Lunch seminar with Katarzyna Krzyżanowska
Constitutional identity – A Perspective from the Polish Constitutional Agents
Abstract
Though national constitutional identity has become a topical issue in the very recent years and numerous doctrinal or historical studies have already analysed the content of the judgements, there is still very little research on this topic from the socio-legal perspective. Thus, the thesis takes the case of Poland, the EU member state that underwent significant constitutional changes in the past few years, and applies sociological methods to discover how the constitutional actors, including judges and the clerks— the former and the current ones — are envisioning the concept of constitutional identity and how different it is from the definition provided in Article 4(2) TEU. The precise question that this PhD thesis is attempting to answer is how the Polish constitutional judges understand constitutional identity and how do they envision the relation between the national constitutional arrangements and the EU primacy principle in light of the recent constitutional developments, broadly known as the rule of law crisis. The thesis then examines the people who are responsible for the construction of the Polish constitutional imaginary, their ideas, and the different ways of expressing resistance towards the EU legal order since Poland joined the EU in 2004.
The more ambitious goal is to analyse whether the constitutional identity concept hinders or rather enhances European integration, and what is the role of the core constitutional actors — judges —in this process. To this end, the thesis makes use of the socio-legal method of semi-structured interviews conducted with the constitutional judges and clerks, which are focused on the background knowledge of the EU making the judges to decide in a particular way the constitutional problems with European dimension. The empirical part of the thesis gathers insights from the public interventions or publications made by the judges on the European topics.
The thesis takes stock of the extant and robust literature on national constitutional identity as understood by scholars and judicial practitioners in the European Union. Firstly, it engages with the sociology of concepts and attempts to understand “how normative ideas are formed by, and how they in turn help to form, processes of social evolution”, in this respect: the EU integration (Thornhill 2021: 14). At least two approaches to national constitutional identity could be dissected from this scholarship: the first one treats national identity in essentialist terms and discusses, in historical terms, the essential elements of this identity, whereas the second one approaches this concept as a tool for mediating or creating conflicts over the legal primacy in the EU. Here, diverse conceptualisations of those conflicts are discussed. Secondly, the thesis provides an overview on the European legal landscape of the uses and misuses of constitutional identity by diverse apex courts and the ECJ. Thirdly, the thesis provides an empirical analysis of the interviews with the judges and their ideas on the EU integration and EU constitutionalization. Fourthly, the assessment of the doctrinal, normative and empirical findings is conducted. Fifthly, the thesis ponders over the consequence of the current rule of law crisis and attempts to answer questions like: should we double down on European dimension or there is still appreciation of particularity, and asks if the concept of constitutional identity has been tainted only recently or perhaps it was the case even before.
Speaker bio
Katarzyna is a PhD candidate at the European University Institute, Department of Law, where she conducts a research on the judicial understanding of constitutional identity in times of the rule of law crisis (the case of Poland). She employs empirical methods (semi-structured interviews with the constitutional judges and the clerks) to discern the ways in which judges conceive of the relations between the national constitutional law and EU law.
For her studies, she visited the Centre of Law and Society at Cardiff University (2022) and the Institute for European Studies at ULB (2023).
Katarzyna is also an editor of the Review of Democracy, an online platform issued by the CEU Democracy Institute, where she is a Head of the Review of Books section
Meeting ID: 695 9224 5003
Passcode: 981836