Not Up for Grabs! How to Robustly Protect EU’s Pouvoir Constituant Mixte

In this article, I argue that accounts of the EU as a pouvoir constituant mixte (PCM) would remain incomplete without granting EU citizens immediate access to transnational political and social rights. The dual standpoint that transnational EU partisans are required to take in order to fulfil the precept of PCM is doomed to remain inert and frail without robustly empowering and resourcing the voices of EU citizens across the borders of EU’s member-states. The very tension built within such a dually constituted power, I argue, cannot be robustly shielded from ethnocentric interests and associated calls for disintegration without entrenching all EU citizens' opportunities to exercise their political and social rights transnationally. In a nutshell, my argument will be that in the current institutional framework of the EU a European pouvoir constituant mixte requires transnational partisanship the robust exercise of which in turn requires immediate access to transnational political and social rights. Access to such rights, I will argue, does not require EU’s transformation into a federal constitutional order. The argument proceeds in the following steps. Section II provides an overview of recent literature on PCM and assesses the argument that its exercise requires transnational partisanship in the case of the EU. Section III provides two arguments (one general and one specific to the case of the EU) as to why the effective exercise of European transnational partisanship, in line with PCM, requires granting EU citizens immediate access to transnational political rights. Section IV shows why granting EU citizens immediate access to transnational political rights necessarily entails granting them also access to transnational social rights as well as why such immediate access to both political and social rights is compatible with the current constitutional order of the EU as a PCM. Section V examines a number of objections, while Section VI concludes.