The project is funded by the ERC Starting Grant (803163) with Professor Jan Komárek as the Principal Investigator. It runs from February 2019 for five years and investigates constitutional imaginaries behind the European integration project at both national and the EU level.
The project investigates European Constitutional Imaginaries: sets of ideas and beliefs that help to motivate and justify European integration as a constitutional project. It examines such imaginaries at two levels: First, supranational, produced by thinkers aiming at the international audience and communicated across borders – between various levels of government, and also across particular Member States. Second, IMAGINE seeks to understand how the ideas of statehood and constitutionalism responded to the demands of European integration and got transformed along the way. We put special emphasis on post-communist member states, but do not leave “Old Europe” out of the picture. The aim of the project is to integrate various perspectives into a more complete picture of how constitutional law imagines Europe than has been ever achieved.
IMAGINE’s principal investigator, Jan Komárek works on an intellectual history of EU constitutionalism and how it has been made part of European constitutional imaginary.
Each of the four postdoctoral researchers conducts an in-depth study of one post-communist EU member state (the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary and Poland). The idea is to go beyond integration clauses of national constitutions and the related case law. We aim at drawing a much richer picture that will show how ideas of sovereign statehood and legitimate constitution have been evolving in response to the turbulent history of these countries. Case studies therefore build on local workshops, where we hope to reach academics and intellectuals who, for various reasons, have not participated in the international discourse yet.
The project has an empirical component too. Citation network analysis, surveys and other tools are being employed with the help of our data specialist.
Read a conceptual note for the project here.
We are on Twitter and have our Podcast.
For more information about IMAGINE’s activities and job openings related to IMAGINE please contact Professor Komárek. News about job openings are also posted at IMAGINing LOUD under Jobs@IMAGINE.