Although when implementing the project, the MSCA Research Fellow had to adapt to the exceptional circumstances due to Covid-19, the goals and objectives of the MSCA proposal have been fully met.
As the kick-off of the MSCA project, the Fellow organised a workshop on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the 1989 round table discussions in East Central Europe, which yielded the Verfassungblog symposium 19 89 19: Thirty Years After the Round Tables.
The first part of the project dealt with the challenges to constitutionalism in the European Union and investigated both the meaning of constitutionalism and the nature of the anti-constitutional developments in the V4 countries. This research yielded two book chapters, a journal article and a couple of blog posts. Later, the Fellow examined how constitutionalism is protected on the European level (both within the framework of the European Convention on Human Rights and the Treaty on European Union) and studied how the concept of constitutional identity fit into the European constitutional project. A couple of journal articles resulted in English, German and Hungarian, and the Fellow delivered the main findings at leading conferences (Council of European Studies, ICON-S).
During the third part of the project, the Fellow learned about the concept of national identity applied by EU law. The Fellow wrote a journal article on the concept of identity under EU law, which argues that the concept of national identity in EU law is a constitutionalist one and demonstrates how an ethnocultural national identity claim runs counter to this constitutionalist concept.
The Fellow also conducted an in-depth analysis of 4 + 1 case studies: the Visegrád countries and Germany. The reason for including Germany was that this country and its constitutional jurisprudence on constitutional identity served as a reference for the V4 countries’ constitutional courts. The Fellow was supposed to gather data at the respective constitutional courts, but the courts suspended all research visits because of the pandemic. Therefore, the Fellow Zoom-interviewed constitutional judges and experts of the V4 constitutional courts.
In the last phase of the project, the Fellow has prepared a manuscript of an edited collection and submitted the manuscript to a major international publisher and as a special journal issue proposal.
The Fellow delivered a total of twenty-three publications. Furthermore, an additional journal article and two book chapters are underway. The Fellow has published the project results in English, German, Hungarian, Polish and Romanian. All publications are available either on the website of the respective journal as Open Access or on the Fellow’s Academia.edu website. The Fellow set up a special trilingual (English, German and Hungarian) website for the project where the research activities are made known to society. Both the Fellow’s home university and her host institution promoted the Fellow’s presentations and publications using their social media accounts. The research outcome is also communicated on the Academia.edu website of the Fellow. In 2018, the Fellow’s Academia.edu site had 2,061 views and 47 followers. In 2021, it had 6,735 views and 134 followers.
