EU Constitutionalism, Crisis and the Security of the European Project

These are troubled times for any transnational European apologetics. What seemed to be a promising future for European integration in the first decade of this century – however that future might have been imagined – has turned into a desolate land and a dystopic idea threatening the social and political order both at the national and EU level.  In a way, the Brexit crisis sums up all previous crisis and raises the stakes even higher than previously thought. This paper suggests that one way of looking at the crisis is through the lens of security. It argues that security lies at the heart of Europe's constitutional identity. The reason for this is not only that the Treaties of Rome were signed and ratified with the idea of creating a safe zone in which war would be banned among the countries participating in it. Security is also a fundamental rationale upon which the European liberal project is founded. After examining the legal implications of Brexit, the paper shall focus on three dimensions of the security rationale: the economic and financial dimension, the free movement and citizenship dimension and the area of freedom, security and justice dimension. It will be shown that, in all these dimensions, security and fundamental rights emerge as discourses of power, with all their tensions and contradictions.