The European Constitution as an Opportunity for a Fulfilled European Citizenship

Abstract

The possibility and the necessity to elaborate a Constitution for the new Europe have become a key-matter within the actual political debates, closely related to the claim made by the advocates of a European Union seen as a coherent and unitary politeia. Of course, the motivations for advocating such a Constitution may be different. Some see it as a decisive step towards the so long delayed political unification or as a warranty for consolidating the stability and the role of Europe as a main actor on an international stage marked by what some people called, after the ruin of the postwar bipolar balance, the „diffusion of power“. Federalists entertain the hope that a more efficient institutional organisation free from centralism as well as a democratic differentiation of the decision-making process may lead to a genuinely united European family with mature members individually responsible for their destiny. Other groups of the civil society, partisans of minority groups and of the doctrine of human rights, like many union movements as well, aspire to a an explicitly endorsed and uninterpretable maximisation of the civil and social rights in particular.