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75 Id. at 297: “[As] long as (a) the national community has not explicitly committed itself to EU law as the supreme law of the land and (b) European institutions have not established a political process with elections and directly representative institutions at its heart and remain dependant on national democratic processes for its legitimation and (c) a European public sphere, European civil society and a European identity as the sociological prerequisites of a meaningful democratic process have not yet developed to a sufficient degree, a blanket rule requiring national courts to set aside national constitutional provisions is incompatible with respect to democratic legitimacy and the institutional role of constitutional courts in constitutional democracies.”Google Scholar

76 Id. at 299. These principles are: the formal principle of legality, jurisdictional principle of subsidiarity, the procedural principle of democracy and substantive principle of protection of basic rights or reasonableness.Google Scholar

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85 Id. at 524. These are the principles of pluralism, consistency, vertical and horizontal coherence, universalizability and institutional choice.Google Scholar

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108 Among the revised constitutional narratives only socio-teleological constitutionalism is expressly against documentary constitutionalization (and probably, reductionist constitutionalism per se). The other approaches, in principle, remain open to it but caution against potential ‘statist collateral damage.’Google Scholar

109 Weiler, , supra note 13, at 517.Google Scholar

110 The principle of primacy or supremacy can serve as the best example. While the ECJ has almost unexceptionally used the term primacy standing for a relational, non-hierarchical principle, the majority of constitutional narratives have consistently employed the term supremacy denoting a hierarchical legal structure of integration.Google Scholar

111 For example, even though the integration is internally pluralist, consisting of multiple levels, the competitive claims to ultimate legal authority have to be reconciled so that there is eventually just one answer to each case. And even if they appear to be many at this point they will gradually through every day “tolerant” practice (have to) be reduced to one.Google Scholar

112 Socio-teleological constitutionalism might serve as the best example. While it takes over the formal hierarchical constitution from the classical constitutionalism in its entirety, it fails to explain how its constitutional vision of the integration can be then genuinely tolerant and thus truly legitimate if a normative ideal of constitutional tolerance is introduced only when the constitutional framework of a clearly hierarchical nature is already in place. In other words, socio-teleological constitutionalism first hierarchically subordinates national legal orders to a hierarchically supreme EU legal order and then requires them to be tolerant. This is, of course, a prescription bound to get very few on board, for it seems to be imposing tolerance at a stage when the equilibrium has already been lost, when the structural issues have already been decided and when tolerance consequently could work just one way. As a consequence and simultaneously, it is then also difficult to see how this constitutional narrative could fulfill its aspirations to bring about a more horizontal and conversational constitutionalism when its genetic code is its exact counterpart.Google Scholar

113 James Tully, Strange Mutliplicity 9 (1995).Google Scholar

114 Id. at 37-38. Tully stresses that constitutional language is neither monolithic nor immutable. It is flexible and adjustable. Hence there is no need to discard constitutionalism as such.Google Scholar

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116 This, presumably at least, should not apply to the main advocates of the constitutional theories presented in this article.Google Scholar