The conference on Constitutional Political Economy convened in Messina and Taormina in October 1997 was a singular academicintellectual event. The conference sponsors did an outstanding job in attracting serious research scholars from many countries, all of whom had demonstrated an understanding and appreciation of the importance and relevance of constitutional issues in the world at the end of the century, in both international and national political settings.

In my own introductory remarks at the conference's opening session in Messina, I emphasized the potential significance of the European and Italian venue for such a conference. Europe, at century's end, almost above all else, needs to pay explicit heed to its emerging political structure, which has, to this point, been allowed to evolve through the origin and development of its separate institutional agencies, without constitutional coherence, even as imposed or modeled by those whose task is to bring intellectual-philosophical order into complex organizational reality.

The elementary first step toward constitutional understanding, namely the recognition of the necessary distinction between the choiceoperation of the rules or constraints and the choice-operation of ordinary politics within the constraints, has never been characteristic of European attitudes, even those emerging from the academies. The integration of the historic nation-states of Europe requires attention to basic constitutional issues. European research scholars must, by necessity, become constitutionally informed.