Legal Professionals or Political Entrepreneurs? Constitution Making as a Process of Social Construction and Political Mobilization1

During 2002–2003, the European Convention prepared a draft treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe that was later reshuffled into the now in force Lisbon Treaty. Although the decision-making process at the Convention received considerable attention, little is known about the drafters themselves, both as individuals and as a group. In this article, I argue that the drafting of the constitutional treaty can be described as a process of social construction/political mobilization in which a transnational community of legal professionals/political entrepreneurs successfully put the issue of a European Constitution on the political agenda, and later framed the debates at the Convention, where a wider circle of prominent politicians proved rather receptive to their arguments. Based on an in-depth empirical study, including a systematic analysis of the social recruitment of the Convention, this article highlights the part played by transnational professional communities—somewhere in-between “epistemic communities” and “advocacy networks”—in contemporary European politics.