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In the spring of this year, within only a couple of weeks, the institutional order of the European Union (EU) has been thoroughly shaken, turning into sheer institutional "disorder". After the referenda on the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe held in France and in the Netherlands, hardly anybody will question that the Union finds itself in an utterly dramatic situation. Seen from the point of view I am going to sketch out in the following sections, what became manifest with the turbulences of May and June 2005 are the symptoms of a crisis that had remained more or less latent for a longer period of time. The trends culminating in the rejection of the European Constitution by a majority of French and Dutch citizens reflect a crisis of political legitimation. I will argue that this crisis is basically the crisis of 2 specific mode of political legitimation, or, to be more precise, a consequence of the tendencies to link governance in the EU primarily to this mode. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2005 EU constitutional referenda results reflect the growing Euroscepticism in Europe. The literature focused on the French or Dutch rejection, ignoring the positive votes in Spain and Luxembourg. Given the similar sociodemographics of the ‘no’ vote and the political party preferences in all four cases, what explains the variation in the results? The literature has so far been divided between the ‘second-order’ and ‘attitude’ models, attributing the results to domestic or European factors, leading to inconclusive results. First, I hypothesize that the more the Eurosceptic arguments/frames resonated with contentious domestic issues in a member state, the less support that state’s public would give the EU in a referendum. I argue that in France and the Netherlands while no campaigners started early and addressed people’s daily problems by priming key contentious themes, the yes campaigners came into the debate late and failed to deliver a uniform message. Second, I hypothesize that sequencing mattered; the later a country held its referendum, the more the previous referenda results and campaigns in other states influenced its public. I use field work data including interviews with campaign leaders and public opinion surveys. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, I compare America?s 18th century antifederalists and Europe?s 21st century counterparts, giving special attention to the similarities in the set of principles that underlie each opposition to the Constitution. This study examines opposition to the Constitution in a number of EU member states, but it focused on the successful antifederalist cases of France and the Netherlands. Through a comparison of the role of antifederalist opposition in the American and European Constitutional crises, this study contributes to the theory of federalism as it relates to Constitution building. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]