I have already stated here that I was not convinced that the constitutional concept had really been abandoned, and I tried to show that the most significant parts of the constitution are still alive by my survey of the text produced by the last Council.

However I found that there is a still much deeper reason to consider that the constitutional concept wasn’t really abandoned but just hidden. I will try to be as much concise as possible.

We saw more or less each modern democratic Republic being built in the same way: there was a constitutional assembly (usually elected by the people), the assembly wrote a constitution (which sometimes has been confirmed by an other popular vote), on the base of that constitution the republican institutions and laws were given legal value.

What is important to notice here, is that for modifying the constitution the already built States don’t need any more a constitutional assembly because in general the constitution itself states how it can be modified by the Republic institutions, usually the Parliament.

So my conjecture is that since at least 1992 EU has been already functioning as a federal State, with a kind of constitution.

There was an assembly, the IGC that wrote the Maastricht treaty. It wasn’t a directly voted assembly but it has enough delegated power to sign such a kind of treaty, that then was ratified by national Parliaments or popular referenda. On that base as been built the EU. So even if the treaty singed in 1992 wasn’t called constitution it has worked as a constitution, with a Supreme Court to guard at it!!! Besides what has never been called a State, the EU, has been working as a State with a Parliament and a shared executive power among the Commission and the Council.

Besides there is a really important detail of this last Council whose implications I didn’t noticed at the beginning. It was the European Council, an institution of the EU, to call the IGC and to give it a very precise mandate! So it was the EU itself to ask to reform the founding texts it is built upon!

From all these premises I derive that EU is already a federal State, at least since 1992, and that the only reason because we didn’t notice this is that it differs from other federations such as USA or Canada or Brazil because there isn’t a common army or a common foreign policy (even if we have to say that in the Maastricht treaty they are considered objectives to reach in the future).

So I think that even if the treaties are not called constitution they actually works as a constitution. So even if this new treaty will not be called constitution it will actually work as a constitution in the same way the past treaties have done.