Europe’s lack of solidarity in its response to the humanitarian crisis. Jeopardizing the European Union’s constitutional imaginary

The European Union’s (EU) constitution and constitutionalism is best seen as a sphere of contested imaginaries, competing narratives over the legal-political construction of Europe. These imaginaries have been historically reinforced by EU technocrats and political elites, as well as by various social and economic actors, whether progressive democrats or powerful businesses. When technocrats and elites turned their hands to the project of the constitutionalization of the EU in the early 1990s, what they had in mind was to legitimate the Union. In this respect, constitutionalization was necessary because the Union had ceased to be a typical international organization. Laws, regulations, and policies that were adopted at EU level had an impact on citizens; however, these had no influence over either law-making or policy-making processes. The first segment of this paper addresses the forging of the EU’s constitutional identity through the juridification of values, imaginary, and constellations. It then analyses the progressive creation of constitutional imagination at EU level and the effects on this imaginary that the lack of a proper answer to the humanitarian crisis has caused. The paper ends by posing a set of questions that relate the ideological project of European collective identity, the process of political integration and the role that the founding values of solidarity and human dignity may play in these processes.