Staging conflicts in the context of constitutional complexity

AutorMarco Goldoni
CargoLecturer in Legal Theory at the University of Glasgow
Páginas31-38
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. 31-38, Jan./ Jun. 2015.
31
Staging conflicts in the context of constitutional complexity
Marco Goldoni
1
One of the most common criticisms leveled against European constitutionalism (and
European legal scholars) is to be prone to a peaceful representation of the European legal system
as a multi-level structure where rational actors kindly discuss intra- and between levels in search
for proper solutions in a complex institutional environment.
2
The Tangled Complexity of the
EU Constitutional Process claims that this is at best a caricature of European constitutionalism
and it provides a challenging re-interpretation of European constitutional integration as a
complex conflict-driven evolutionary process. Martinico points at the dialogues or clashes
between courts which have marked the development of the European Union as the leverage
which has allowed a robust European constitutionalism to flourish thanks to (and not despite)
major constitutional struggles. Accordingly, at the core of the volume lies the intuition that the
clashes between courts, and in particular between the ECJ and national constitutional courts,
have not weakened the normative appeal of European constitutionalism. To the contrary,
Martinico’s idea is to show how the space for a peculiar kind of supranational constitutionalism
was opened up precisely by these judicial interactions and sometimes disagreements. Martinico
stresses the central position of constitutional conflicts when he notes that they ‘are physiological
and that they can play a systemic role, favoring the changing nature of the EU legal order. In
other words, constitutional conflicts are functional to the development (not to be understood in
a deterministic manner) of the EU legal order’ (p. 51). This repeats an old republican insight
(Machiavelli), the commonwealth’s health is preserved through internal struggle among
factions.
From a constitutional perspective, the volume reacts against two trends and by doing so
it stands firmly within the field of constitutional pluralism. On the one side, Martinico argues
against those reconstructions of European constitutionalism which are too lenient toward a
1
Lecturer in Legal Theory at the University o f Glasgow. References to pages from G. Martinico, The Tangled
Complexity of the EU Constitutionl Process, Routledge, Abingdon, 2012, will be between parentheses in the main
text.
2
In the Italian debate, see M. Luciani, ‘Costituzionalis mo irenico e costituzionalismo polemic o’, Giurisprudenza
costituzionale, 2006, pp.

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