Modern Constitutionalism and Constitutional Anomie in the New EU Member States

I will focus on the obsoleteness or crisis of recently introduced modern constitutionalism in the new EU member states (although the problématiques I discuss have wider implications for modern constitutionalism in Europe). The obsoleteness or crisis of constitutionalism I am alluding to has some affinities with Emile Durkheim's notion of 'anomie'. In Durkheim’s view, anomie emerges in a situation of an absence of regulation of social relationships, resulting in declining social solidarity [Durkheim 1997, 304]. Anomie is then about a disjunction between the legal and the social [Augenstein and Hendry 2009, fn 24]. With regard to the problématique of modern constitutionalism in contemporary Europe, there is arguably a situation of anomie in the sense that there seems to exist a profound mismatch between existing institutions, institutionalised models and norms, and imaginaries (here designated as modern, Westphalian constitutionalism based on a unitary nation-state) and a rapidly changing political and societal context that does in crucial ways not correspond to an institutionalised, Westphalian framework. In other words, there are a number of clear discrepancies between institutions and society. This disjunction seems to be particularly evident in the landscape of the recently established constitutional democracies in Central and Eastern Europe.