Acceso usuarios
Karl-Heinz Ladeur
The failure of the European constitutional treaty has not been taken seriously by the European constitutionalists. It is regarded as a kind of accident which will be repaired in due course. The article is a plea for a reopening of the debate on Europeanness. Europe cannot and should not be a ‘superstate’; nor can it be a kind of revival of the European nation state which is threatened by globalisation. Even less can it be a community of post‐national deliberators as Jürgen Habermas would have it. Europe should be constructed as an entity of its own which responds to the heterarchical relational logic of fragmentation which characterises post‐modernity and globalisation of which it is a part. It cannot be its counterpart. Europe does not need a ‘constitution’, and it does not need a ‘people’ either.
