Constitutional Identity of the EU Legal Order: Delineating its Roles and Contours

Abstract

European integration can be described as the product of multilevel interaction between the European Union (EU) legal order, and the legal orders of the Member States. The notion of the EU level’s constitutional identity has received little attention to date. This stands in contrast to the constitutional identities at the Member State level which have been studied increasingly in recent years. Consequently, this contribution studies the question whether the EU legal order possesses a constitutional identity of its own. The position is taken that this legal order can and should be perceived in terms of constitutional identity, thereby rejecting doubts on whether this is possible and whether the paradigm of identity is suitable for conducting analysis. The contribution ends by outlining the ways in which the EU level’s constitutional identity can be discovered by distinguishing between diachronic identity and synchronic identity.