A Constitution for Europe? Some Hard Choices

The Convention on the Future of Europe is likely to produce a constitutional prototype for Europe. In this article I focus on five hard constitutional choices which Europe will face: the constitutional significance of enlargement; the ‘pure’ constitutional issue, namely the significance of form; the issue of Europe’s social solidarity as a defining identity marker and the question of whether it should, therefore, be constitutionalized thereby taking it out of day–to–day politics; the issue of policing rather than defining the demarcation of competences between the Union and Member States; and, finally, the tricky issue of a human rights policy for Europe.