One of the central issues arising during each of the Intergovernmental Conferences which has taken place since that of Maastricht, which inscribed the notion of limited conferred competences for the first time in the EC Treaty, has been the attempt to establish clear limits to the powers of the European Community and Union. The ‘delimitation of competences’ was placed on the initial post-Nice agenda of 2000 alongside only three other issues, and the ‘division and definition of competence’ was listed as the first of the pressing ‘challenges and reforms’ of the Laeken Declaration of 2001. No surprise, then, that this question was once again amongst the key questions for debate during the Convention on the Future of Europe, occupying the attention of at least two working groups (those on complementary competences and subsidiarity), and surfacing in many other political and academic debates on the proposed Constitution.
