A new European Constituent Process? A Deliberative Constitutionalist suggestion

The present paper aims to address the debate on the legitimacy of European constitutionalism through different foundational assumptions. It is a well- known matter that constitutional states suffer of paradoxical origins, among which a vicious cycle of legitimation between the sovereign and founding constituent power and the legitimated constituted authority stands out the modern narrative. This has led, on one side, to a crisis of trust between present and future claims and the founders’ intentions and commitments; on the other, to various sceptical authors to dismiss the concept of constituent pow- er, especially where the transnational dimension configures as pluralist and post-sovereign. On the contrary, the paper proposes the recovery and review of the idea of constituent power in deliberative constitutionalist terms: it envisions a circular constituent process among generations, an ongoing conversation that could continually unveil the moral substance of the demos and reconstruct retroactively its own origin. Deliberative constitutionalism provides an efficient remedy to the problem of authorization among generations, as well as to the liberal friction between constitutionalism and democracy. In this sense it frames constitutions both as a mirror and catalyst of the community. The paper claims eventually that this constituent process could be a distinctive feature of the European polity itself, identifying the normativity of transnational constitutionalism as the opportunity to fix modern paradoxes and trusting flaws.