ABSTRACT
The European project is underpinned by a fundamental conflict on how politics should be organized in Europe (Hooghe and Marks 1997). The European Union (EU) is indeed a political system in a state of quasi-permanent crisis, whose very existence is frequently questioned and in which the debate not only deals with the type of desired policies but also with how and at which territorial level decisions should be made. Constitutional issues are numerous, recurring and perceived as problematic (Neunreither 1998). And because there is no shared vision of what the EU could or should be (Mény 2012), there have been, since the very beginning, competing views concerning the nature, scope and finalité of the European project. These tensions have only been reinforced by the multiple crisis the EU is currently facing.
