EUROPEAN CONSTITUTIONAL IMAGINARIES: UTOPIAS, IDEOLOGIES AND THE OTHER

Project Information

IMAGINE

Grant agreement ID: 803163

DOI

10.3030/803163

Project closed

EC signature date 5 November 2018

Start date 1 February 2019

End date 31 January 2025

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 497 685,00

EU contribution

€ 1 497 685,00

Coordinated by

KOBENHAVNS UNIVERSITET
Denmark

Periodic Reporting for period 4 - IMAGINE (EUROPEAN CONSTITUTIONAL IMAGINARIES: UTOPIAS, IDEOLOGIES AND THE OTHER)

Reporting period: 2023-08-01 to 2025-01-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

IMAGINE investigated European constitutional imaginaries: sets of ideas and beliefs that help to motivate and justify European integration as a constitutional project. IMAGINE argued that constitutional imaginaries are as important for the practice of government and collective self-rule as institutions and office-holders. Constitutional imaginaries provide political action with an overarching sense and purpose recognized by those governed as legitimate and provide them with a sense of collective political identity. In short, constitutional imaginaries turn societies into political communities. Our research concerned two levels: supranational and national. The main objective was to find links between them and to understand how they have developed in response to some key events in the postwar European history, especially after 1989 and the “End of History” moment.

Jan Komárek, Professor of European law at the University of Copenhagen is the Principal Investigator, accompanied by a team of four postdoctoral researchers from four different countries (Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary and Poland).

At the supranational level we study constitutional imaginaries produced by constitutional thinkers at the EU level and communicated across borders – between various fields of power, and also among particular Member States.

IMAGINE’s second research stream concerns the national level. There we seek to understand how constitutional imaginaries of particular member states have responded to the demands of European integration and got transformed along the way. We put special emphasis on post-communist member states, but do not leave “Old Europe” (whatever it is) out of the picture. IMAGINE integrates various perspectives into a more complete picture of how national constitutional law imagines Europe.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The IMAGINE project ran from February 2019 to the end of January 2025 – the sixth year was an extension granted due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Project in 2020-2022.

In the first year, Jan Komárek (IMAGINE's Principal Investigator – "PI") focused on a conceptual refining of IMAGINE. He conducted a workshop that led to the first major publication of IMAGINE, the volume entitled "European Constitutional Imaginaries: Between Ideology and Utopia", published by the Oxford University Press in 2023. Before its publication, a working paper series was created (in cooperation with the existing series published by iCourts, the research center where the PI is based). IMAGINE's results could thus be disseminated quite early.

The three years between 2020 and 2022 were devoted to our collective work, which resulted in the second edited volume, entitled "European Constitutionalism the Other Way Round: From the Periphery to the Centre," to be published by Cambridge University Press in October 2025. Jan Komárek and all postdoctoral researchers—Birgit Aasa, Marina Bán, and Michał Krajewski—worked together on the volume.

Individually, they also published articles and chapters that contributed to the Project. Most importantly, Michał Krajewski published the article "The constitutional quandary of social rights: Questions in times of the Polish illiberal turn" in one of the major journals in our field, International Journal of Constitutional Law and received the journal's Special Mention Prize for an outstanding article published in volume 21 (2023).

In the last two years of the Project (2023-2024), Jan Komárek focused on the final major output of the Project: his monograph entitled "The Imaginary Factory: Constitutional Scholars and Europe's Constitutionalism." In November 2024, a book publishing contract with the Cambridge University Press was concluded, with the expected publication date in mid-2026. The last event of the Project, workshop "THE IMAGINARY FACTORY: Rethinking EUropean constitutionalism with Paul Kahn" took place in January 2025 and paved the way towards more discussions and scholarly work inspired by the Project and the monograph.

Besides the conference and workshops mentioned above, IMAGINE hosted six speakers in a series (COVID-19, unfortunately, prevented us from organizing more) and had five meetings of a reading group. The Project also came up with something more innovative: IMAGINing Together, where IM?AGINE hosted (or connected online) other research teams or centres that pursue research on topics of shared interest. There were four such meetings.

Finally, all IMAGINE researchers participated in over 50 events over six years, including conferences, invited talks, and other events. For example, in October 2023, the PI was invited to a conversation with Prof. Bernard Harcourt at the European Institute, Columbia University, on "Can (and should) constitutional scholars save liberal democracy? Lessons from Europe and the US"; he presented the Project at other top institutions, such as Berkeley Berkely Law School, Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, the EUI, and many others.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

First and foremost, the project provided a more precise understanding of the concept of the constitutional imaginary, which had been used rather vaguely in the existing literature. We were able to distinguish it from social imaginaries studied by political philosophers (e.g. Charles Taylor) and provide a conceptual framework that allows constitutional scholars to better understand the deeper underpinnings of their discipline and use this understanding for an analysis of particular constitutional systems, be it the EU or its member states. Jan Komárek's forthcoming book, The Imaginary Factory: Constitutional Scholars and EUrope’s Constitutionalism (publishing contract with CUP concluded, expected publication mid 2026) is devoted to various “constitutional imaginaries” that constitutional scholars put forward since the end of World War Two until the present. Using the “cultural study of law” approach, the book fills the gap left by legal historians and sociologists, exactly as the PI hoped at the beginning of the Project. The book makes an original claim about how to use these insights in a particular way: not as a detached study of the field, but rather a critical contribution to constitutional imaginaries of the EU.

Second, we have shown how certain issues that may seem to be unique for some parts of Europe (e.g. post-communist member states’ emancipation from their past spent as “colonies” of the Soviet Empire, and their ensuing concerns about sovereignty and self-sufficiency) are in fact shared – even if expressed in a different language (and perceived through different imaginaries). The volume edited by Jan Komárek, Birgit Aasa, Marina Bán and Michał Krajewski, European Constitutionalism the Other Way Round: From the Periphery to the Centre (to be published in CUP, October 2025), “turns the table” and makes the perspective of post-communist Europe the key one, setting out the agenda for researchers from the “West”. The volume thus collects contributions from all parts of Europe, by scholars from various disciplines and levels of seniority, from Martin Loughlin, Emeritus Professor of Public Law at the LSE, to a couple of recent PhD graduates, who nevertheless communicate across the whole volume (as they did in the course of a series of workshops and a conference, that led to the publication of the volume).

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