The paper aims at contributing to the comparative research on Europeanisation, by assessing the European Union’s seminal experience of protracted treaty reform, from the 2001 Laeken summit to the 2009 Lisbon Treaty. This process provides an exemplary field for analysing the patterns and dynamics of Europeanisation and the impacts they have on the norms and practices of democracy in the member states. The paper aims at bringing normative democratic propositions in dialogue with empirical social science research about the EU’s constitutional treaty experiment. Its particular focus is on those dimensions of domestic politics or national democratic processes that have been affected by and reflected conflicts about the reconstitution of the EU’s legal and institutional order. Comparing old and new member states, the analysis brings together original empirical research findings from an international research group (ConstEPS, funded by VolkswagenFoundation) regarding those arenas where popular contestation and political controversy about EU treaty reform have played out, from court litigation, parliamentary deliberations and party politics to the mass media, civil society, and citizens’ participation. By comparatively exploring the patterns and dynamics of conflict about European integration in these arenas, the paper contributes to better understanding and theorizing whether and how the EU contributes to transforming democratic nation states in Europe. Bridging Europeanization and democratization research, the paper identifies trends towards transnationalizing domestic democratic processes rather than supporting supranational democracy in Europe.
