Résumé
With what political or juridical precedents is the process of European unification best compared? Do the experiences of constructing modern Nation-States in Europe – or beyond it – supply appropriate precedents, once scaled up to multi-national level? Or is the European Union, as it has gradually taken shape, essentially sui generis as a polity, without relevant counterparts in constitutional development anywhere else in the world? If the history of State-making in the Old World appears very different from the evolution of the European Union in the paths each has taken and the upshot at which they have arrived, does the emergence in the epoch of the Enlightenment of a continental federation in the New World offer the most instructive lesson for a post-modern Europe? Answers to these questions raise issues of decisional statecraft and democratic will-formation on both sides of the Atlantic that have yet to command any consensus.
