The European Convention : a process of mobilization?

Abstract

It would be wrong to see the European Convention on the Future of Europe as a simple transmission belt between one treaty negotiation and another. In fact, it represented a discontinuity in European Union (EU) patterns of governance. Although one of the main tasks of the Convention was to pave the way for the intergovernmental conference (IGC) opened under the Italian Presidency of the EU on 4 October 2003, one cannot place it in parenthesis and trace a straight line between Nice and the 2003 IGC. And it would be wrong to reduce the Convention to its output – that is, the draft constitution. In this essay, we set out to examine the Convention as a political process, specifically a process of mobilization.