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Examines the European Convention (the European Convention on the Future of Europe) within the process of constitutional reform in the EU, with an emphasis on the institutionalization of treaty reform. After an introductory section, the chapter next looks at institutionalist questions on treaty revision processes, discussing the traditional method used, that of the Intergovernmental Conferences (IGCs), and aiming to identify a ‘less intergovernmental’ view of reform processes. The third section provides a historical and up‐to‐date review of the European Convention, focussing on its background, operation, and decision‐making processes. The fourth argues that choices regarding the nature of the Convention's remit and its working methods have reinforced a new landscape of constitutional reform, namely, an institutionalized setting more complex in both the players involved and its dynamics, and where institutional choices are likely to affect significantly the classic key variables of intergovernmentally driven processes. The underlying theme of the chapter is that the outcomes of the 2004 IGC will not be able to be accounted for by focussing solely on governments’ preferences and power.

This chapter examines how legal pluralism and extraterritoriality contributed to shape the public debate in China and Japan in the last decades of the nineteenth century. It contrasts official Chinese and Japanese responses to a series of widely publicized consular courts cases and shows that the Japanese authorities were much more successful in mobilizing public opinion against extraterritoriality than the Qing Empire was. The chapter argues that one of the reasons for the Japanese success was the fact that the Japanese state had created a relatively unified citizenry by abolishing all traces of legal pluralism.

The Lisbon Treaty is the result of a very long-drawn process of treaty revision that started with the Laeken Declaration of December 2001 and ended eight years later, with the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty on 1 December 2009. The chapter examines how this political process was fitted within the legal straightjacket of the existing rules about treaty revision contained in Article 48 EU Treaty. The chapter then proceeds to discuss the revised ‘rules of change’ as contained in the Lisbon Treaty itself. Although these revised rules offer some more flexibility for the enactment of future treaty amendments, that flexibility is still very limited so that accomplishing treaty amendments will remain a structural problem in the European integration process. The chapter will therefore also examine the alternative modes of piecemeal institutional change, short of formal treaty amendment, that are available for the future.

This concluding chapter addresses two issues that are distinct — enhanced cooperation and Treaty revision — but which are nonetheless connected, the linkage being tension between the desire that all should be brought on board as the EU advances or changes, and the difficulties that this can pose in an EU of twenty-seven Member States. The analysis begins by considering enhanced cooperation. There is a brief overview of the provisions on enhanced cooperation in the Nice Treaty, followed by discussion of the changes made by the Lisbon Treaty, the rationale for these amendments and their likely impact. This is followed by examination of the Lisbon provisions on Treaty revision. These were, like much else in the Lisbon Treaty, borrowed from the Constitutional Treaty. The chapter concludes by examining some of the broader implications of the new schema for enhanced cooperation and Treaty revision. The focus then shifts to more general reflection on process and content in the Lisbon Treaty. The objective is not to summarize the conclusions drawn in previous chapters, but rather to re-visit and reflect on the issues of process and content raised at the outset.

This concluding chapter addresses two issues that are distinct — enhanced cooperation and Treaty revision — but which are nonetheless connected, the linkage being tension between the desire that all should be brought on board as the EU advances or changes, and the difficulties that this can pose in an EU of twenty-seven Member States. The analysis begins by considering enhanced cooperation. There is a brief overview of the provisions on enhanced cooperation in the Nice Treaty, followed by discussion of the changes made by the Lisbon Treaty, the rationale for these amendments and their likely impact. This is followed by examination of the Lisbon provisions on Treaty revision. These were, like much else in the Lisbon Treaty, borrowed from the Constitutional Treaty. The chapter concludes by examining some of the broader implications of the new schema for enhanced cooperation and Treaty revision. The focus then shifts to more general reflection on process and content in the Lisbon Treaty. The objective is not to summarize the conclusions drawn in previous chapters, but rather to re-visit and reflect on the issues of process and content raised at the outset.

Over the last two decades EU migration policy has undergone an astonishing ascent from modest and obscure beginnings to an increasingly mature and vibrant field of EU policy-making. The purpose of this chapter is to explain this development across the past three Treaty revisions. It particularly focuses on decision rules and the institutional set-up of EU asylum and immigration policy, subjecting the results of the Intergovernmental Conference negotiations to causal analysis. Drawing on a revised neofunctionalist framework, four factors are suggested to account for processes of supranationalisation in this field: (a) functional pressures; (b) the role of supranational institutions; (c) socialisation, deliberation and learning processes; and (d) countervailing pressures.

The durability of a treaty requires its capacity to adapt and change in accordance with the evolution of the situation for which it was designed to apply. One of the means that allow such adaptability is evolutionary interpretation. This chapter underlines the twofold nature of this interpretative technique. According to a first approach, evolutionary interpretation may be considered as a way to identify the common will of the parties as it would have resulted if they had renegotiated the agreement taking into account the circumstances that have since evolved. In the silence of Article 31 of the Vienna Convention, the case law of the ICJ supports the view that such a dynamic interpretation is allowed only where it is possible to infer from the terms of the treaty that the text is open to considerations of factual or legal evolution after its conclusion. However, when a treaty establishes an organization designed to achieve a shared purpose, the international judge entrusted with task of interpreting that treaty is often prone to act as the depositary of the common finality. In such a case, evolutionary interpretation tends to a teleological one. It therefore leads to question how far such interpretation could be taken and may generate allegations of ‘judicial activism’.

This chapter examines the latest theoretical trends and the two treaty revisions that occurred during the mid-1980s and early 1990s, introducing the Single European Act and the Treaty on European Union (TEU), which resulted from the treaty revisions, and neofunctionalism, which re-emerged as the leading theory of European integration. The next part studies the state of theorising European integration in the 1990s in relation to the constitutional and political physiognomy of the Maastricht Treaty. The final part of the chapter focuses on the new theoretical approaches, which include the fusion thesis and new institutionalism.

This chapter reflects on the different ways the Union has used to adapt itself to changing circumstances, and their limits: the rigid Treaty revision procedure, case law, variable geometry and enhanced cooperation, and the phenomenon of international agreements among all or some Member States in areas that could fall within the scope of Union law, such as the Treaty establishing the European Stability Mechanism. The chapter discusses in detail the causes and consequences of those international agreements, analyzing the ways in which the Court has tried to frame them, in particular in the Pringle judgment.

The beginning of the interwar period brought an intensification of the war guilt debate within the Ligue des droits de l’homme. There was vigorous discussion of the question of the Russian general mobilization in 1914. Repeated attempts by the Ligue’s minority to extract a commitment to seek revision of the Versailles Treaty failed. The most that the majority would concede was that the Treaty was legally flawed because it had been forced on Germany, but it continued to believe that the Treaty expressed a valid moral and historical point. The Ligue demanded—unsuccessfully—the publication of French documents relating to the outbreak of the war. The majority continued to argue that there was no point in opening a debate on war origins, although by the end of 1924 it is clear that it was much less confident in the rectitude of its position.