A key idea of the Strukturwandel is that European law finds its constitutional core in Article 2 TEU. This project with Jelena von Achenbach, Philipp Dann, Anuscheh Farahat, Claudio Franzius, Matthias Goldmann, Michael Ioannidis, Stefan Kadelbach, Karen Kaiser, Christoph Krenn, Anna-Katharina Mangold, Christoph Möllers, Mehrdad Payandeh, Giacomo Rugge, Robert Schütze, Ferdinand Weber and Mattias Wendel, organised by Jürgen Bast and Armin von Bogdandy, develops this idea.
First, the project deepens the understanding of the constitutional core and expands it to include Art. 1 and Art. 3(1) TEU. Second, it identifies a basic structure of EU constitutional law in Articles 1 to 19 TEU. In fact, the Treaty of Lisbon realises much of the long-standing project to provide the Union with a "basic treaty" that brings together the fundamental decisions. This allows de lege lata to conceive a new, far more constitutional order within EU primary law. This, in turn, allows to better understand, systematise and interpret it, remembering Dreidre Curtin’s famous dictum that the Treaty on European Union brought “constitutional chaos”.
Each contribution focuses on one basic provision, presenting its history and its systemic role as the "head" of further provisions "downstream" in the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. It then embeds it in theoretical and doctrinal debates, showing what difference the new approach makes. In sync with scholarship’s critical function, the contributions show deficits in fully realizing the "Lisbon" constitutional model. Articles 1 to 19 TEU provide for internal critique and reveal European constitutionalization as an unfinished project.
This project builds on the former project “Principles of European Constitutional Law”. Nomos will publish the German version in 2024, and an English edition is in preparation. The idea is expressed in this article: Jürgen Bast/Armin von Bogdandy - Grundlagenteil und Verfassungskern der EU-Verträge, JuristenZeitung 79 (2024), 115-125; in English: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4740888.
