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Abstract

The study offers solutions to the crucial European Union´s crisis issue of how to overcome the present deadlock of the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe,giving priority to a short, concise Treaty merging the existing Founding Treaties on European Union and European Community along the traditional line of the dynamic, gradual evolvement of the European integration and cooperation. The author uses the method of applying the lesson taken from the process of dynamically gradual stages in European integration history to current challenges and to the prospects of further reforming the enlarged European Union. The author describes the dynamic stages showing that the Monnet integration method had its successes in European integration,but also experienced its limits, facing a dilemma of how to continue the successful integration process without giving a clear final design of the European Union. The more the EU enlarged with now twentyseven members, the more the doubts about the Union´s identity,namely its decisiveness, increased ,and thus the Union´s need of legitimacy increased requiring broad democratic approval by the European citizens. Establishing a constitution can be taken as political signal giving an European identity building political impulse. But establishing a Constitution can also be taken as an act of political intervention, it can be misunderstood, in the view of the citizens, as a final design of the European Union. The author is giving no priority to any political intervention by establishing a new Treaty text labelled “Constitution” and, by doing so,would again further damage the European Union´s legitimacy and risk misunderstandings to invest a new order, a static order similar to the static nature of nation state´s Constitution. Whatever label a new Treaty text will actually turn out, the enlarged European Union´s identity and legitimacy is the crucial issue: how to further develop the Union´s constitutional essentials – democracy, transparency and decisiveness- , essentials to be incorporated in a new Treaty text. The study´s method of applying the lesson taken from European integration history is exemplified in chapter IX also, applying the findings to the issue of the Union´s decisiveness, to the Union´s role played in the field of the Common Foreign and Security Policy focussing on the Union´s experience made in the years 2001-2003 after the September 11 attacks and on the current crucial issue of international security and cooperation politics of how to overcome the deadlock in Iraq and the serious prospect of another deadlock in Afghanistan.