Constellations Volume 13, No 2, 2006. © The Author. Journal compilation © Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. The European Constitution Project after the Referenda Gráinne de Búrca 1. The Unexpected Constitution In the summer of 2005 the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe, having been drafted over a two-year period following a novel constitutional process, was rejected in popular referenda held within days of one another in two of the European Union’s 25 member states. Since that time, the ‘European Constitution’ project has not been formally abandoned, but instead has been deliberately placed in a state of suspension by virtue of the political decision taken by the 25 heads of state and government, following the negative referendum results, to allow a ‘period of reflection’ for a year before any further decision or action is taken. Consequently, the European Union currently finds itself in this supposedly reflec- tive state, pondering the next steps in the constitutional process which was so unexpectedly launched in 2001. After outlining briefly the origins of the Constitution project, this paper examines the current state of play, reflecting retrospectively on the wisdom of the project in the light of its apparent failure, and considering its current and future prospects. The political project of enacting a documentary European Constitution is of very recent origin. Until the year 2000, in fact, the term ‘constitution’ had not entered mainstream European political discourse, remaining confined to special- ized debates among EC lawyers and academic scholars who spoke of the ‘consti- tutionalization’ of EC law by the European Court of Justice, 1 or occasionally in the neglected proposals of committed Euro-federalist groups. 2 The fact that a document establishing an EU Constitution was signed by 25 member states in June 2004 should therefore be a matter of some surprise. And yet, from the time that the political debate was publicly launched by Joschka Fischer in 2000 in his Humboldt University speech, a clear consensus at the level of the European political elite developed rapidly around the question of the desirability of an EU constitutional settlement, and culminated in the adoption of a text only four years later. 3 This unequivocal manifestation of high-level political agreement on the need for a constitution was not, however, accompanied by significant popular support. At best, during the course of drafting the constitutional text there seemed to be a wide degree of public apathy, with debate remaining limited to specialized interests and actors, in spite of the initial hopes that the new Convention would