Exploring the constitutional complexity of the EU. An introduction to a symposium
| Autor | Giuseppe Martinico |
| Cargo | Associate Professor of Comparative Public Law, Scuola Superiore S.Anna, Pisa |
| Páginas | 6-10 |
P A N Ó P T I C A
PANÓPTICA/STALS INTERNATIONAL BOOK SYMPOSIUM
In: DELLEDONNE, Giacomo; SIQUEIRA, Julio Pinheiro Faro Homem de (ed.). “The tangled complexity of the
EU constitutional process. A Symposium”. Panóptica, vol. 10, n. 1, pp. 6-10, Jan./ Jun. 2015.
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Exploring the constitutional complexity of the EU. An
introduction to a symposium
Giuseppe Martinico
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I would like to express my deep gratitude to Julio Pinheiro Faro Homem de Siqueira and
Giacomo Delledonne - the special editors of this Symposium - for the attention paid to my book
The Tangled Complexity of the EU Constitutional Process: The Frustrating Knot of Europe,
Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2012, http://routledge-
ny.com/books/details/9780415688192/.
This means a lot to me and gives the present author the possibility of recalling some of
the ideas included in the volume. To this aim I have been asked to present the main points of
the book in order to ‘kick off’ the discussion. I would like to start by recalling what I wrote in
the last chapter: in 2005, Nico Krisch opened his essay ‘Europe’s Constitutional Monstrosity’
(N. Krisch, ‘Europe’s constitutional monstrosity’, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 2005, 321-
334) by recalling that in 1667 Pufendorf had described the Holy Roman Empire as monstro
simile.
Starting from this anecdote, Krisch lingered on the mismatch between the classical
constitutionalism and the European one, given the irregularities and inconsistencies that the
supranational integration process displays when compared to the nation state model.
In those pages, however, the citation of Pufendorf slipped away too quickly without
reflecting on the meaning to be attributed to the Latin word monstrum.
Today ‘monster’ refers to one whose features are considered ‘unnatural’, this word having a
mainly negative meaning.
However, in Latin monstrum stood for both ‘monster’ and ‘miracle’, so much so that
monstra were the signs of God. Something similar happened with the Greek téras, which
originally meant the first sign from God, a sign capable of inducing terror.
Trying to recover the etymology of the word, I could say that this book wants to be an
essay on the ‘monstrosity’ of the EU, its ‘prodigiousness’ (which is expressed in its ‘non-
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Associate Professor of Comparative Public Law, Scuola Superiore S.Anna, Pisa.
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