Preface and Acknowledgements

As political scientists have pointed out, a new wave of Euroscepticism is hitting the EU, following the political crisis due to Brexit and the pandemic.1 We feel that it is right to make it clear from the outset that this is not a self-defence manual for Europeanists.2 It is worth clarifying this, since those who argue for the existence of a body of European constitutional law have recently been accused of offering bad faith representations of the allegedly technocratic (and, according to some, even autocratic) and neo-liberal tendencies of the European integration process. It is no coincidence that, for some years now, scholars have accused colleagues interested in European constitutional law of constructing a dangerous mythology and have also boldly suggested that ‘it is simply impossible to claim that acknowledging to European law the condition of “constitutional order” is either a neutral way of referring to the object of study of a legal-dogmatic discipline, or a means of promoting the transformation of European law in the semblance of democratic and social constitutionalism’.3 In works like these, the EU today is depicted as a dangerous and undemocratic entity, the rejection of everything constitutionalism stands for.