Challenging the Masters of the Treaties. Emerging Narratives of Constituent Power in the European Union

Since the failure of the Constitutional Treaty, the EU has gone through a phase of near-constant crisis. The conflicts about the Lisbon Treaty, the turmoil caused by the measures undertaken to rescue the euro, and the shock of the Brexit referendum have given rise to struggles about the future of European integration. Numerous demands for constitutional change and visions for ‘another Europe’ have been voiced in the public sphere. In this context, the classical notion of pouvoir constituant has been revived as part of the political vocabulary and is now frequently referred to in order to reject representative claims. In particular, non-institutional as well as institutional actors refer to constituent power to call into question the conventional role of the states as the ‘masters of the treaties’. In what can be described as political storytelling, alternative views are constructed as to who should be in charge of EU constitutional politics, how the respective subject came to find itself in that position, and on the basis of which representative mechanisms it should exercise its founding authority in the future. From the perspective of democratic theory, however, it remains notoriously vague and contentious what constituent power could mean in the context of a multi-level polity. In this paper, I map four emerging narratives of constituent power in the EU in order to prepare the ground for a systematic normative account.