Europe doesn’t exist: anatomy of a constitutional phantom

The ritual repeats itself relentlessly, an absurd theater where Europe doesn’t exist yet millions pretend it does. Citizens march toward polling stations to elect representatives to a phantom parliament, legitimizing a union without constitutional foundation. As we mark our preferences on the ballot, we transform into unwitting accomplices in this collective fiction—earnestly playing European citizens in a continent where Europe doesn’t exist beyond intergovernmental treaties and bureaucratic arrangements.

The Great Removal

Europe doesn’t exist from a constitutional law perspective. Europhile rhetoric desperately tries to conceal this uncomfortable truth beneath layers of bureaucracies, treaties, and institutions. What we grandly call the “European Union” remains technically just an agreement between sovereign states—an international pact bearing no relation to a genuine political community. It stands as an edifice built on emptiness, a colossus with feet of clay pretending to stand without foundations.

The Maastricht Treaty crystallized this ambiguous nature, definitively enshrining European identity as a mere intergovernmental agreement. Brussels officials, aware of the democratic abyss beneath their feet, attempted to mask it with a “European constitution” project—a term whose very juxtaposition reveals the deception.

Structural Failure

The history of that document epitomizes the imposture permeating the entire European project. Drafted by committees of technocrats without popular legitimacy and approved by an intergovernmental conference, when finally subjected to citizens’ vote, it was soundly rejected. Faced with this failure that should have marked the experiment’s end, the response was simply to bypass the popular will.

Through a maneuver that in any democratic context would amount to a coup d’état, the constitutional project was tacitly abandoned and replaced with a new international treaty—the Lisbon Treaty—replicating much of the content already rejected by citizens. This time, understandably, they carefully avoided submitting it to popular approval.

A Parliament That Isn’t a Parliament

In this framework of absent legitimacy, the so-called “European Parliament” reveals itself for what it is: a compensation chamber without real legislative powers, a simulacrum of democracy lacking the fundamental prerogative of any parliament worthy of the name—the power to propose laws. This faculty remains firmly in the hands of the Commission, an unelected body perfectly embodying the technocratic nature of the entire European edifice.

The debate that pitted German jurist Dieter Grimm against philosopher Jürgen Habermas illuminates this fundamental contradiction. Habermas, like many intellectuals buried in abstract systems, believed he could base the European constitution on public opinion. Grimm, armed with his solid legal culture, demonstrated this position’s inconsistency: a constitution presupposes a constituent power, and a constituent power presupposes a people. But a European people simply doesn’t exist.

The Specter Haunting Europe

This remains the great absence in discussions about Europe, the void around which the entire European construction revolves: the idea of a European constituent power—the specter no one dares evoke. Without this foundation, every claim to democratic legitimacy becomes fiction, a mask covering the reality of a political entity without real sovereignty.

It’s no surprise that the only semblance of European unity emerges when the Union acts as a vassal to the United States, participating in wars corresponding to no common interest and even less to the will of European peoples. The EU operates as a NATO branch office, which itself is nothing more than a military agreement between states—not a political community with its own worldview.

If an impostor is “one who imposes on others belief in things alien to the truth and operates according to that credulity,” then European institutions in their current form are precisely an imposture. They ask us to believe in the existence of a political community without foundation, to legitimize through voting a parliament lacking essential powers, to accept decisions without any democratic legitimation.

Beyond Imposture

Another idea of Europe will be possible only when we’ve cleared the field of this fundamental imposture. We say it without pretense: if we truly want to conceive a political Europe, we must remove the European Union in its current form—or at least prepare for the moment when it collapses under the weight of its internal contradictions.

Only then can we begin to imagine a true European political community, founded on an authentic constituent power expressing the will of Europe’s peoples. Until then, Europe doesn’t exist—it will continue to be a phantom, an aspiration, perhaps a necessity, but not a concrete political reality.

This elementary truth should illuminate every discussion about the continent’s future. We aren’t participating in an exercise of supranational democracy but perpetuating a fiction that mainly serves to mask the legitimacy void at the European project’s heart. The first step toward a real Europe is recognizing that, today as yesterday, Europe doesn’t exist.

When someone invokes Europe as a political entity, we should always ask ourselves: which Europe? That of interstate treaties? That of bureaucracies without legitimation? Or perhaps that which doesn’t yet exist but could be born from the ashes of the current imposture?

If we want to give meaning to our European being, we must face the truth: Europe doesn’t exist yet as a political community. And until we have the courage to truly create it, we’ll continue living in the shadow of a constitutional phantom.