Abstract

After the Maastricht and Amsterdam Conferences the European Union can no longer be conceived as an intergovernmental arrangement: It is a polity founded on an “overlapping consensus.” Consequently, to reconstruct the relations between national and Community law, legal monism does not work, neither in its statist, nor in its international version: Legal pluralism is needed, not in a sociological‐descriptive sense, but as a normative criterion by which a judge (and a citizen) must refer to many and various sources of law to settle a dispute. Legal pluralism, however, can operate only under a rule of recognition: a common normative framework within which a reasonable number of sources can be handled. What Europe needs, therefore, is an interactionist constitution, which should emerge through an “open‐ended”discursive process.