European Union (EU) and the rationale behind its formation.

European Union (EU ) and the rationale behind its formation

I . Introduction

The development of representative parliamentary institutions and the codification of fundamental rights constitute processes which are foundational for liberal democratic polities . In this , we argue that these developments are , however , not solely restricted to the domain of the nation-state . In the European Union (EU , over the past half century , the European Parliament has undergone a remarkable transformation from an assembly endowed with supervisory powers to a directly-elected legislator , co-deciding most secondary legislation on equal footing with the Council of

Ministers . While human rights were not institutionalized in the founding Treaties of the European Communities the European Court of Justice (ECJ ) began to make references to fundamental rights in its jurisprudence since the late sixties (Stone Sweet 2000 . The recent past has seen the codification of fundamental rights in the Charter of Fundamental Rights and , most recently , in the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe . Yet , the processes which underlie these two developments are fundamentally different to the `parliamentarization ' and institutionalization of human rights in nation-states . In the EU , these processes have not been triggered `from below ' by civic protest or even revolutionary movements , or as a result of the intervention of foreign powers

The phenomenon we refer to as `constitutionalization ' is the process whereby the EU 's institutional architecture and legal increasingly come to reflect the fundamental norms and principles of liberal democracies . The central focus of this is thus to identify the dynamics and mechanisms that brought and continue to bring about parliamentarization and institutionalization of human rights : Why and under what conditions have human rights become increasingly enshrined in the EU 's legal architecture ? Why has the European Parliament (EP ) come to acquire powers over time that resemble those of national parliaments more than those of any parliamentary assembly of an international organization (Malamud and de Sousa 2004 Rittberger 2005 : 2-3

We will argue that for explanations inspired by both rationalist and constructivist institutionalism these two phenomena constitute a puzzle which has not yet been resolved . To counter this state of affairs , we propose to analyze the constitutionalization of the EU as `strategic action in a community environment (Schimmelfennig 2003 . According to this approach , community actors can use the liberal democratic identity values and norms that constitute the EU 's ethos strategically to put social and moral pressure on those community members that oppose the constitutionalization of the EU . Theoretically , strategic action will be most effective in a community environment if constitutional issues are highly salient , constitutional norms possess high international legitimacy and resonate well with domestic norms , and if constitutional negotiations are public . In a first attempt to test our argument empirically , we conduct a Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA ) of the EU 's constitutional decisions from 1951 to 2004 . While the results generally confirm the hypothesized conditions , they reveal salience to be the by far most relevant condition of constitutionalization in the EU

However , the European Union - EU for short - is an organization...