4.1 Introduction

One of the idiosyncrasies of the countries in Eastern and Central Europe is supposed to be their especially strong attachment to sovereignty. Ivan Krastev has argued that Europe’s East–West divide is also inscribed in political imaginaries, and that this fact was clearly visible at the time of the EU’s Eastern enlargement. In contrast to the anti-nationalist postmodern vision that had emerged in the West, ‘the Eastern European nation-states that joined the EU in 2004 were rather obsessed with the ideas of national sovereignty and ethnic homogeneity’, claims Krastev.Footnote ¹ Or, as Rogers Brubaker has put it: at the time when Western Europe seemed to be moving beyond the nation-state, Eastern Europe was apparently moving back to it.Footnote ² Of course, even in Western Europe, it has never been obvious to everyone that the nation-state is on the way out. The ideas of sovereignty and the nation-state have often been questioned in a polemical mode, vis-à-vis those believing that, whatever the innovations in the legal architecture of the EU, these novelties do not call for a fundamental revision of constitutional categories. Others have insisted that the nature of the EU could never be captured without the imagination being expanded beyond the already familiar. As Joseph Weiler memorably said in reference to the Maastricht decision of the Bundesverfassungsgericht, to describe the EU without rethinking in creative ways the concept of a polity is to be ‘looking backwards, like Lot’s wife’, to something based on the tired old idea of an ethno-culturally homogenous people.Footnote ³ Against the background of such discussions of the new and the old in constitutional thinking, East-Central Europe has tended to appear as a site of almost comic archaism. According to Anneli Albi, when the recently restored countries of East-Central Europe began to consider EU membership, they did so from the perspective of a traditional idea of sovereignty, centred on such ideas as independence, ethnically defined nation-state and national self-determination.Footnote ⁴ In a similar vein, Signe Larsen has contended that post-communist countries have retained their own brand of constitutionalism which celebrates ‘the ideas of nationalism, the nation-state and national sovereignty’.Footnote ⁵

When faced with such claims, and reflecting on the role of constitutional imaginaries, the first question that comes to mind is whether it could make sense to ascribe a uniform constitutional ideology to a region as large and variegated as East-Central Europe. But if constitutionalism is not an ideology or a worldview, weaving together a set of consistent beliefs about the nation, the state and sovereignty, then what could be meant by saying that these concepts are nonetheless central to the constitutionalism of East-Central Europe? Needless to say, sovereignty itself can be imagined in various ways. There is a long tradition of portraying sovereignty as a myth – something with no corresponding reality other than the force by which it captures the imagination.Footnote ⁶ Hans Kelsen decried the ‘dogma of sovereignty’ and accused it of inhibiting the development of international law.Footnote ⁷ Resistance to European integration has sometimes also been explained by the strength of outdated ideas.Footnote ⁸ Indeed, to suppose that some national judiciaries remain in thrall to a conception of sovereignty as an absolute and indivisible power, would this not make it hard for them to see it as shared or parcelled out in a way that European integration is assumed to require? And if this is true, are not countries in East-Central Europe particularly exposed to sovereigntism by their shared constitutional outlook? On the other hand, if their proneness to distinct ways of thinking about the nation and its relation to the state – assuming that such regional idiosyncrasies exist – do not translate directly into any legal doctrines, or even an attachment to some traditional notion of sovereignty, then how could their views about the nation be depicted as constitutional ideas or imaginaries, as opposed to more general social representations that might be populating the mind of those interpreting the law?

Despite all the diversity encountered in East-Central Europe, there is, in fact, a recurring cultural theme running through this region: the idea of being a small nation that has suffered great historical tragedies. This theme certainly gives rise to an imaginary of sorts, a very rich imaginary even, which loses its subtlety when reduced to such catch-all expressions as ‘ethnic nationalism’. A distinction should be made between the general concept of the nation and the particular set of ideas that a group of people entertain about themselves as a nation, such as the idea of being a small afflicted nation situated in a dangerous area.Footnote ⁹ The latter is an example of the kind of social myth that offers an identity to a collective and becomes an essential part of collective imaginaries.Footnote ¹⁰ Attempts have already been made to find some common themes in the political myths of East-Central Europe (for example, the theme of a civilizational bulwark against the East), and to distinguish their varieties in different countries (aside from such particular national myths as the Holy Crown of Hungary or Polish messianic martyrdom).Footnote ¹¹ If the idea of being a long-suffering small nation is to be considered a common regional myth of this sort, then it, too, must be understood in a sufficiently vague manner, allowing for variation in what exactly the predicament of the nation consists in and what historical tragedies it has suffered. Moreover, if this idea is to be taken as a constitutional imaginary, then it must be admitted that it is thoroughly ambiguous in its implications. No political or legal position with respect to sovereignty follows from the mere observation that the nation is small, endangered, and therefore in need of protection.

Contrary to what has been suggested by Benedict Anderson – who famously defined nations as imagined communities – the nation is not always imagined as a sovereign entity, destined to inhabit a sovereign state.Footnote ¹² The national imaginary may be more open-ended. Depending on the kind of threats that are thought to besiege the nation, state sovereignty may appear either as an all-important protective shield or, on the contrary, an obstacle precluding membership in some larger political community where the nation could fare better than in solitude. In other words, even supposing that countries in East-Central Europe share a collective mentality centred on the category of the nation, and that this mentality induces them to consider fundamental political problems through a particular lens, it does not follow that they should be especially attached to state sovereignty in any traditional sense. Rather than viewing constitutionalism as an expression of some definite ideology, it might be more helpfully approached from the perspective of the problems that are deemed essential by those who practice it. On this reading, constitutionalism is a language that simultaneously frames and engenders disagreements about issues related to constitutional interpretation. The ‘nationalist rhetoric of the small nation’, as Siniša Malešević has described it, is an axis of debate which functions by continuing to stir up new, often contradictory ideas that can be built into rivalling constitutional doctrines.Footnote ¹³ When the question of sovereignty is treated in this framework, we realise that East-Central Europe’s constitutionalism is actually much less archaic than it might seem. Not merely is it open to revising the concept of national sovereignty; it positively invites questions that lead us to re-imagine nation-statehood in a way that supports European integration.

4.2 The Misery Thesis

It is remarkable how consistently descriptions of East-Central Europe have advanced some version of what might be called the misery thesis. All nuances aside, the thesis is broadly about an Eastern Sonderweg: the idea that the region is different from Western Europe now because its history has been different. In other words, the thesis has two parts. It asserts, on the one hand, that the region possesses some distinguishing characteristics (a particular political culture, a type of nationalism different from the one current in the West) and, on the other, that this peculiarity is best explained by going back to the past, in some cases to the Middle Ages or beyond. This line of thinking finds its locus classicus in the famous essay ‘The Miseries of East European Small States’ by István Bibó, a Hungarian political theorist who wrote at the time of WWII, attempting to lay bare the deep origins of the catastrophe he had seen unfolding. Contrary to the view that was dominant in Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia – the three states he was mostly concerned with, alongside Germany which he also assigned to Eastern Europe – Bibó argued that the neighbourhood’s small states had not appeared in pre-war dramas merely in the role of victims but had made a large contribution to international tensions with their chronically maladjusted, at times grossly anti-democratic internal politics. For him, the fundamental question for understanding the catastrophe was this: Why had the region abandoned democracy and political liberalism after hailing them so enthusiastically in the wake of the First World War? Bibó’s explanation was that, whilst the cause of freedom and the cause of nationalism had progressed harmoniously in the West, these ideals had drifted apart in the East. A sequence of traumatic collective experiences had led to the conviction that democracy cannot be realised without jeopardising the national community. Not only leaders but the populations of small Eastern European states had come to believe that, if they cared about the fate of their nation, they simply could not afford to implement democracy and political freedoms to the full, however much they may have approved of these values in the abstract.

Bibó’s thesis was not only about the predicament resulting from someone imagining (wrongly, he emphasised) that there is an incompatibility between democracy and national welfare or even survival. For understanding how this mistaken conclusion could be drawn, and how it could ensconce itself in the mind of Eastern Europeans as a putative lesson of history – prompting them to develop ‘the greatest monstrosity of modern European political development: anti-democratic nationalism’Footnote ¹⁴ – one had to revisit the process by which nations had first emerged in this region. Bibó claimed that the great divergence between East and West could be traced back to the circumstances of nation-building in various parts of Europe. In the West, nations took shape and had the opportunity to mature within pre-existing states, with the result that national and state boundaries overlapped when masses began to be drawn to nationalism at the time of the French Revolution. The Eastern lands, by contrast, were under the power of great empires in the nineteenth century, so that the smaller nations inhabiting this space, unable to realise their aspiration to statehood, were reduced, faute de mieux, to cultivating their language and folk customs – not as an idle pastime but to prove that nations were more real, more solid entities than the existing states. According to Bibó, it was not smallness as such which produced the impasse from which Eastern national movements hoped to escape by a turn to a völkisch identity. Small nations also existed in the West, but they fared much better, noted Bibó, pointing to Belgians, Danes and others as examples. The main distinguishing factor in the East was the presence of loosely integrated, semi-fixed political organisations: not sufficiently implanted to create national loyalties corresponding to state boundaries (to swallow up the small nations, as it were), yet strong enough to prevent fragmentation and consolidation along national lines (the formation of small nation states). Such conditions prevailed only in Central-Eastern Europe and, for this reason, as Bibó put it, linguistic nationalism became the region’s specialty.

Bibó was not the first to emphasise the lack of overlap between national and state borders in Eastern Europe and to remark on the importance of this fact for the mentality of the region’s inhabitants. In 1915, at the time of WWI, Tomáš G. Masaryk had told a London audience that, if they wanted to understand Eastern Europe, they needed not a political but an ethnographic map. ‘An Englishman, speaking of his nation, identifies the nation and state. Not so the Serb or the Bohemian, because to his experience state and nation do not coincide, his nation being spread over several states, or sharing a state with other nations.’Footnote ¹⁵ Not that this was a great misfortune, from Masaryk’s point of view. Although he spoke of Eastern Europe as an ethnological ‘danger zone’ ridden with cultural and political conflict, for him, there was no misery in the condition of its small nations. Yes, they were latecomers in staking their claim to statehood, but their prospects were bright. Small nations were no less able to protect themselves if sufficiently determined to resist attacks. Masaryk conceded that the nations of East-Central Europe might suffer from some disadvantages, such as a more limited population and a weaker economy, but these handicaps were the result of imperial oppression. ‘Let the smaller nations be free: do not interfere, leave them alone, and these drawbacks will soon disappear.’Footnote ¹⁶

Here was an authoritative view of Eastern Europe that underlined the small size of its nations yet was thoroughly optimistic in tenor. How did the misery thesis emerge then? It started to take shape at the time when the ‘danger zone’ of small nationalities became a scene of many independent states. In the mid-1920s, Edvard Beneš, the foreign minister of Czechoslovakia, could still confidently maintain that most of these states were committed to freedom and democracy. Beneš admitted that the region was beset with the problem of discontented ethnic minorities, but he brushed this difficulty aside and, like Masaryk, depicted current difficulties as a legacy of imperial misrule (‘a bad training for the present majorities and minorities alike.’).Footnote ¹⁷ What brought about a crucial change in perspective (reflected in Bibó’s later analysis) was the claim that the most fateful legacy of the imperial period was a distortion in how Eastern Europe nations imagined themselves. Outside observers pointed out a discrepancy between the self-understanding of the new countries as ‘national states’ and the fact that none of these states included only one single nation.Footnote ¹⁸ Bibó took up this line of reasoning, contending that, when small Eastern European nations gained statehood, they remained captivated by the territorial fantasies they had developed under imperial domination, and acted as if these aspirations were somehow more real than the reality. As Walter Kolarz put it in his study of the myths of Eastern Europe (1946), beside every actually existing state, there was a ‘shadow State shaped by the nationalist imagination’.Footnote ¹⁹ To see the potential clashes between these various shadow states, one only needed to draw a graph of the divergent claims.

Even today, the canonical picture of Eastern Europe’s misery is that of a strange nationalist fantasy world saturated with historical memories. The ‘demons of the past’ appear to be especially active in this region.Footnote ²¹ The main thrust of such arguments is that East-Central Europe’s idiosyncrasies cannot be explained by the fact that the region remained on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain. ‘If one regards Soviet Communism as a disease, then it seems that Eastern Europe may have had a pre-disposition to the infection’, wrote one historian.Footnote ²² In the mid-1990s, Tony Judt tried to show that the line dividing Eastern from Western Europe is not an artificial creation dating from the Cold War, ‘recently drawn across a single cultural space’, but rather something older and more real. Similarly to Bibó, Judt made much of the fact that Eastern European peoples were confronted with a well-formed state system at the time they came to political consciousness. ‘To have been formed into a recognized nation and a permanent state in earlier centuries was to have been extraordinarily fortunate’, wrote Judt. ‘Whereas the northern and western European peoples formed states by expansion from a core, absorbing their own peripheries until constrained by topography or competition, the countries of modern eastern Europe were born and could only be born from the collapse of empires – Russian, Turkish, Austrian, German – a process that is still incomplete … This is the great misfortune of the eastern half of Europe: that its division into states came late and all at once. It is what gives to these lands their common history and their common weakness – and it is what in the end makes them crucially different from the luckier peoples to the west.’Footnote ²³

Admittedly, it is not quite obvious why the circumstances of the birth of Eastern European states should be essential for understanding their character today. Why should developments in the nineteenth century and earlier be relevant to an enquiry into the region’s present political culture? Bibó offered an answer that has proven extraordinarily influential: the region has acquired a traumatised identity as a result of its history.Footnote ²⁴ The theoretical paradigm in which Bibó worked was that of collective psychology.Footnote ²⁵ Within this paradigm, it was natural to think that, if past collective experiences have been negative, then the present can literally suffer from history, in the form of a neurosis, for example, or a national inferiority complex that leads to a sense of impotence and a desire of compensation.Footnote ²⁶ Bibó described how major shocks (such as revolutions, foreign invasions, military defeats) can make communities behave as if they were hysterical individuals: lose touch with reality, be constantly afraid of conspiracies, display both insecurity and overblown self-assessment. Unable to come to terms with an overwhelming trauma, a community concocts various make-believe solutions in an effort to ensure by all means that the catastrophe will not be repeated. ‘These are the situations when a nation behaves as though it were unified while it is not, as though it were independent while it is not, as though it were democratic while it is not, and as though it were involved in revolution while it is only languishing.’Footnote ²⁷ Bibó claimed that, although some Western European countries have also suffered from a ‘collective hysteria’, Eastern Europe is especially susceptible to this condition because of its unique calamity-filled history.

A similar relationship between history and collective mentality emerges from a text that has become another locus classicus on regional misery. Milan Kundera’s ‘The Tragedy of Central Europe’ (1984) also described the weight of history and its lasting effect on the mind of those who may not have experienced any great traumas personally. Indeed, Kundera asserted that an element of trauma is part of the very idea of a small nation. ‘But what is a small nation?’, he asked, after having highlighted the importance of this notion for understanding the identity of Central Europe (an ‘uncertain zone of small nations between Russia and Germany’).Footnote ²⁸ He proceeded to offer his famous definition: ‘the small nation is one whose very existence may be put in question at any moment; a small nation can disappear, and it knows it.’ Kundera claimed that, for the inhabitants of Central Europe, the possibility of collective extinction is not merely an abstract truth but a harrowing lesson of history. ‘A Frenchman, a Russian, or an Englishman is not used to asking questions about the very survival of his nation. His anthems speak only of grandeur and eternity. The Polish anthem, however, starts with the verse: “Poland has not yet perished …”’. This statement – ‘Our nation has not yet perished’ – captures Central Europe’s particular vision of the world, according to Kundera. The crucial difference from Bibó is that Kundera did not depict this attitude as pathological in any way. When ‘the devastating march of History’ produces a vision based on distrust and existential fear, the outcome is hard-won wisdom, not a hysteria, he suggested. By contrast to Bibó, who was continually insisting on the distorted character of the imaginaries born out of catastrophes, Kundera seems to have thought that contemporary events were amply justifying the fears of Central Europeans. He described how Russia was again expanding eastward, crushing all cultural variety within the Soviet Union and the satellite countries. On the other hand, it was precisely by such shared experiences of existential peril that nations were drawn together into a regional community. ‘Central Europe therefore cannot be defined and determined by political frontiers (which are inauthentic, always imposed by invasions, conquests, and occupations), but by the great common situations that reassemble peoples, regroup them in ever new ways along the imaginary and ever-changing boundaries that mark a realm inhabited by the same memories, the same problems and conflicts, the same common tradition.’Footnote ²⁹

The emphasis on perception in Kundera’s definition of smallness is very illuminating for understanding the functioning of imaginaries. If smallness is seen as a collective mentality rather than an objective, numerically quantifiable fact, then it matters little if some nation is actually small, or indeed whether there is such a thing as a nation at all outside the cognition of individuals. What matters is that the category of being a small nation is being used to make sense of the world. Moreover, as already mentioned, Kundera situated smallness geographically, speaking of a zone between two large neighbours, Germany and Russia. For the purpose of studying imaginaries, it, again, matters little if we designate the relevant area as Central or Eastern Europe, or whether the region defined by reference to national fragility exists at all in some objective sense. The important consideration is that smallness and location are unified into an essential nexus – national vulnerability is perceived geopolitically, against the background of some geographical place that is seen as determining for the nation’s prospects. It has been observed that national identity nearly always includes an idea of a homeland.Footnote ³⁰ In the case of a ‘small nation’ as defined by Kundera, this must be true, for existential danger is hard to imagine separately from a ‘politico-geographic situation’, to use the expression by which Friedrich Ratzel sought to capture all the consequences of belonging to a particular place (climate, borders, size, relations with neighbouring states).Footnote ³¹

The ‘misery of small Eastern European nations’ can thus be understood in two very different ways. It can refer to an objective condition of vulnerability or, alternatively, it can denote a collective self-image that foregrounds vulnerability. Consequently, the misery thesis may also be reinterpreted as a claim about the potency of a certain kind of rhetoric in East-Central Europe. This is how Miroslav Hroch approached the problem of ‘small nations’ in his influential account of nation-formation under foreign domination. Analysing post-communist countries, Hroch argued that the imperial background of East-Central European history resulted in some ‘permanent characteristics’ that are still present in the collective mentality of its inhabitants. The leaders of dominated national movements idealised smallness, but they also reacted defensively against claims that their nation was a fiction. ‘This gave rise to the ensuing feeling of permanent endangerment of the nation – which was later transformed into a lasting stereotype – as well as an urge to prove the legitimacy of one’s own national existence.’Footnote ³² According to this account, it is thus via stereotypes, such as the tendency to represent the nation as a person with its own history, that the experience of living in a multi-ethnic empire continues to impact the present.Footnote ³³ ‘Identification with a national group includes, as it did in the last century, the construct of the personified and personalised nation’, wrote Hroch in 1992. ‘The glorious history of this personified nation is understood as the, or a, personal past of each of its members. Its defeats are understood as personal failures and continue to affect their feelings.’Footnote ³⁴ By unifying the past and present, and thereby grounding social identity, the category of the nation exhibits the typical structure of a myth, understood not as a false story but as a narrative employed for particular social purposes.Footnote ³⁵ ‘When the object of history is the nation’, remarked Ladislav Holy in his overview of Czech self-stereotypes, ‘it is its imagined existence over time which makes possible the construction of the enduring “we” who imagine “our history” and unproblematically utter, as Czechs do, the phrase “We have suffered for three hundred years”’.Footnote ³⁶

Since myths support social identities, the two may be seen as interchangeable, yet there is clearly no such thing as a single, universally shared national identity, nor should we look for the national myth with respect to any collective. Identity politics can take the form of a debate over whether the nation is small or not.Footnote ³⁷ Even when this happens, however, the category of smallness is still imposed as a frame of political thought. Of course, we do not have to suppose that all countries in East-Central Europe are equally suitable for an analysis emphasising smallness and fragility, even at the level of perception. As we saw, one version of the misery thesis regarding Eastern Europe is that its national myths are loaded with dangerous megalomania. But a great nation with a heroic past can suddenly become small and vulnerable when the mode of interpretation is switched from glorious to tragic, yielding a retrospective impression that its whole history has been overshadowed by the ‘fear of the slow death of a small nation’, as Paul Lendvai has said regarding Hungarians.Footnote ³⁸ Another important characteristic of a myth is that, rather than something fixed, it is a theme which allows for the emergence of many variants or elaborations as the ‘work on myth’ progresses.Footnote ³⁹ In this way, the idea of being a small endangered nation can be continually updated, adding new subthemes or varieties of existential threat – such as demographic decline, for example – so that it becomes a myth that never ceases to resonate with the times.

4.3 The Idea of Post-Traumatic Sovereignty

But how exactly should we think about the political implications of such myths?Footnote ⁴⁰ What is the politics of being a small nation? The thesis that perceived national misery of the kind observable in Eastern Europe leads to an obsession with sovereignty has been defended perhaps most comprehensively by Jarosław Kuisz who has introduced the idea of ‘post-traumatic sovereignty’ to express precisely this nexus. Kuisz starts from Kundera’s observation that it can be an essential, identity-forming experience for the inhabitants of some country to realise that their state may be wiped away. Once this possibility is recognised, and seared on the mind, as it were, the reappearance of foreign domination becomes the preeminent, all-embracing fear. For Kuisz, the paradigmatic case of such a traumatised condition is Poland where, as he says, the state’s survival is the main consideration in approaching nearly all fundamental political problems (with repeated references being made to the eighteenth-century partitions and other similar calamities, like the annus terribilis of 1939, when the country was again carved up by Nazi Germany and Soviet Union). Kuisz claims that, even the dispute over the rule of law that started in 2015 ‘should be understood and interpreted against the background of the trauma of the disappearance of the Polish state from the map of Europe’.Footnote ⁴¹ Whilst the connection may not be evident at first sight, it is precisely the idea of sovereignty that provides the link: the effect of past catastrophes has been to engender an obsessive determination never to lose political independence again, so that everything resembling it will henceforth be perceived as anathema. ‘The loss-of-sovereignty argument is constantly in play’, writes Kuisz, ‘although it is sometimes rhetorically re-packaged to better suit the twenty-first-century context’.Footnote ⁴²

Kuisz mostly dwells on Poland and its national imaginaries of doom, but he argues that East-Central Europe as a whole is suffering from a traumatised attitude to sovereignty, since the inhabitants of most, if not all, countries in this region have internalised the condition that Kundera thought is defining for a small nation.Footnote ⁴³ Loss-of-sovereignty arguments are also frequently heard elsewhere, of course. But Kuisz maintains that they have particular undertones in East-Central Europe where they are ‘fuelled by all sorts of regionally and nationally specific backgrounds from the past’.Footnote ⁴⁴ This claim appears as the latest iteration of a particular kind of misery theme about the political ideology of Eastern Europe. According to a popular view, history has endowed, or infected, this region with a special variety of nationalism centred on ethnicity. Whilst Western civic nationalism is taken to be relatively benign and nice, the Eastern ethnic variety is seen as ‘doomed to nastiness by the conditions which gave rise to it’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Another widely-held belief is that ‘ethnic nationalism’ is not merely an outlook about nationhood but also, implicitly at least, a political worldview prepossessed with sovereignty. Carlton Hayes, an important early figure in the study of nationalism, wrote that it is ‘a basic part of the nationalist creed, in which every citizen of a national state is now educated, that absolute sovereignty is a right inherent in his national state and that any impairment or threatened impairment of such sovereignty is a wrong which cries to Heaven – and to himself – for vengeance.’Footnote ⁴⁶ Although Hayes was not talking about any specific form of nationalism, others have argued that, when adherents of ‘ethnic nationalism’ attain statehood, they, especially, will exalt sovereignty as a high, if not the highest value. In other words, it is thought that ‘ethnic nationalism’ does not morph into something essentially different when the aim of statehood is achieved. On the contrary, it is the state that is rendered cultural and ethnic in orientation, the leaders of the former national movement now having the ambition to enable the core nation to fully realise its sovereignty by permeating the political organisation that has been created. Rogers Brubaker has argued that all states in Central-Eastern Europe are and will be nationalising (and not civic) in this sense, at least to some degree.Footnote ⁴⁷

But is this really true? And how could we possibly test the theory that, in East-Central Europe, statehood is imagined according to what Brubaker calls a ‘nationalist understanding of the world’ which views the political universe as being made up of ‘sovereign, independent and culturally distinctive nation-states’.Footnote ⁴⁸ We can certainly assemble a lot of material that seems to show that states in this region have valued sovereignty in the past. For example, the historian Vojtech Mastny has attempted to demonstrate that East-Central Europe has historically exhibited an aversion to federalism. ‘Federal structures of any kind had been exceptional and federal thinking at best marginal in the part of Europe whose modern history had been so prominently shaped by an ethnic quest for self-assertion within national states’, writes Mastny.Footnote ⁴⁹ He recalls the words of Edvard Beneš who said that federalism reminded the region’s inhabitants of their experience as subject nationalities under imperial domination. Some additional evidence for reluctance to parting with sovereignty could perhaps be derived from the 1950s when a group of exiled politicians and diplomats from nine East-Central European countries (Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Romania) drew up a joint report assessing the prospect of eventually joining the federal projects that were being launched in Western Europe at the time. The group noted that, even though the countries under Soviet rule realised the need for European integration, they were so attached to their national characteristics and cultural independence that they could only countenance pooling some limited sovereign rights.Footnote ⁵⁰ Many other such examples could be found. To come to the more recent period, is it not the case that some East-Central European countries have been contesting with unmissable vehemence the legitimacy of the EU in the name of sovereignty, sometimes going as far as declaring its core treaties unconstitutional?Footnote ⁵¹

The first objection that suggests itself is that sovereigntism is hardly specific to East-Central Europe.Footnote ⁵² The more fundamental problem, however, is that the relationship between ‘ethnic nationalism’ and sovereignty is, in fact, deeply ambiguous. Theories which associate some sort of general worldview with ‘ethnic nationalism’ tend to obscure the concrete aspects in the representation of the nation (whether it is seen as small or large, for example), assuming, mistakenly, that such nuances are immaterial in comparison to what is considered typical, namely, that the outlook is ethnic rather than civic. Also, if the nation precedes the state in the imagination of its adherents, in line with the typical scenario envisaged by the category of ‘ethnic nationalism’, then it means that the nation is separable from the state and can be thought of independently of the legal concept of sovereignty traditionally associated with statehood. To illustrate this fact and show how nations and their political destinies were imagined against the background of empires as they existed in East-Central Europe in the nineteenth century, we can evoke the famous letter that the Czech scholar František Palacký sent to the Frankfurt Parliament in 1848. Palacký said that the Czech nation had a vital interest in the continued existence of a strong multi-national Austrian state because it needed protection from the menacing expansion of Russian power to its east. The disappearance of smaller nations in the Austrian Empire was not a danger, Palacký argued, so long as its constitution was built on the right principles.Footnote ⁵³ There was indeed a strand of thinking which presented sovereign statehood as a natural goal for every truly respectable nation – a sign that a nation had reached full personhood.Footnote ⁵⁴ National fragility was sometimes adduced as a consideration for acquiring independent statehood as a form of protection.Footnote ⁵⁵ Yet by no means was this a self-evident position for someone who asked, liked Masaryk, at the end of the nineteenth century: ‘how can a small nation survive and remain independent?’Footnote ⁵⁶ If political structures were assessed by their ability to further the intellectual and material flourishing of the nation, then it could be argued that a strong empire is, in fact, preferable to a small nation-state. Given the geopolitical realities at the turn of the twentieth century (as the leaders of national movements saw them), the smallness of the nation could also be a strong argument against seeking an independent state.

The notion that all small East-Central European states whose political culture was dominated by the idea of an ethnically or culturally defined nation were obsessed with sovereignty as a result of their having emerged from empires is historically quite inaccurate. Of course, once political independence is achieved, it will tend to become a cherished ideal. The imaginary about nationhood is enriched, becoming multi-layered as it now encompasses ideas about one’s own state and, in addition, some conception of how the state and the nation cohere. A process of mixing, compounding and rearrangement quickly starts. Citizens of the new state are likely to be too attached to the idea of their nation enjoying sovereignty for wishing to revert back to older ‘ethnic’ ideas of merely cultural independence. History will often be re-cast in a way that depicts the state as the crowning achievement of the nation, as if political sovereignty has always been the goal.Footnote ⁵⁷ In reality, as David J. Smith and John Hiden have written about developments in the Habsburg and Russian empires, nation-statehood was mostly thrust upon subject peoples ‘as a result of the sudden collapse of the dynasties under the pressures of war and revolution’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Natasha Wheatley has argued that, if the inauguration of the successor states is narrated ‘purely within the tracks of nationalist history – as the self-actualization of freestanding national units – we risk obscuring the extent to which their modes of self-presentation and self-understanding might originate not with the “nation” but with the empire they ostensibly shucked off.’Footnote ⁵⁹ Wheatley claims that the states created after WWI transported a whole imperial-constitutional imaginary from their imperial origins into the new world order.Footnote ⁶⁰

There was also continuity in thinking about the nation, for ideas about imperial constitutionalism were built into national imaginaries, as the case of Palacký shows. The fundamental dilemma of a ‘small nation’ endured. ‘What good is political independence if the nation is not economically independent?’, asked Masaryk in 1905. ‘Some Balkan states are independent in name only. In reality, decisions about them are made by neighbouring states or only by some large banks.’Footnote ⁶¹ As we saw, ten years later, when WWI had broken out, Masaryk was extremely sanguine about the prospects of small Eastern European nations, albeit without denying that they had some economic drawbacks. By this time, he had come to embrace the idea of an independent Czech nation-state.Footnote ⁶² Yet this hardly means that the considerations he mentioned earlier – the advantages of a greater economic space, the fact small states are dominated by great powers – suddenly became irrelevant.Footnote ⁶³ When new states were erected on the ruins of empires in East-Central Europe, they could also be considered as being independent in name only. Formal sovereignty was not a guarantee of independence.Footnote ⁶⁴ It is true that, in the mid-1930s, when the League of Nations had proven ineffective, Northern and Eastern European small states adopted neutrality as their official line of policy, agreeing to the watering down of the League’s Covenant, preferring greater independence, freedom of action and the absence of any security commitments.Footnote ⁶⁵ This did not result from any abstract conception of sovereignty, however. Neutrality was felt to be the only viable option once it had become clear that all dreams of collective security and federal union had failed.

Before WWII, most governments were reluctant to take on the kind of commitments that multiplied later (the protection of individual rights, the creation of supranational bodies, etc). No Pan-European federation emerged, despite the fact that international and constitutional lawyers began to hail the voluntary limitation of sovereignty as a sign of enlightened thinking.Footnote ⁶⁶ The size of the catastrophe that befell East-Central Europe in the late-1930s, which made any status quo solution impossible there, explains why its politicians were actually among the first to imagine a new political order not merely for their region but for Europe as a whole. ‘After this war, Europe must become an entity, political and economic’, said Władysław Sikorski, the Prime Minister of Poland, calling for a new approach to cooperation in 1941. ‘The State, for example, must begin by relinquishing some of its sovereign rights, if this is necessary in order to reach agreement with a neighbouring State on matters of common interest, especially when the basic problem of security and defence is concerned.’Footnote ⁶⁷ Sikorski was negotiating a federal agreement with the Czechoslovak government, whose representative Edvard Beneš, in spite of his earlier remarks on federalism’s lack of appeal to a post-imperial mentality, also claimed that small nations can only improve their economic conditions and strengthen collective security by creating a larger bloc.Footnote ⁶⁸ As was noted by commentators, the humiliating fate of Central European countries had caused political thinkers to revise their views on state sovereignty. ‘After the last war [i.e. WWI] even the smallest nations aspired to complete independence, but they found it only led to isolation in the face of danger … Today the idea of closer international associations is coming to the fore, so that nations may combine to resist aggression by their stronger neighbours.’Footnote ⁶⁹

The conclusion to be drawn is not that past traumas have made East-Central European countries more, rather than less, willing to curb their sovereignty. Decades of Soviet rule certainly established untrammelled independence as a desirable goal. Soviet domination was often compared to colonialism, so that the language of self-determination became a natural idiom for the ‘captive nations’ of East-Central Europe.Footnote ⁷⁰ Nonetheless, as Jarosław Kuisz is keen to stress, the idea of post-traumatic sovereignty does not posit agreement on where the greatest threat to political independence lies after the shocks that have caused this neurotic condition. It only stipulates that the threat of losing sovereignty is now the fundamental, never-forgotten consideration in approaching political issues. The inevitability of disagreements can be brought home by considering another ‘post-’ condition: a once-imperial nation seeking to come to grips with its diminished status. In attempts to explain Brexit, references were made to British political culture and history, some arguing that the wish to ‘take back control’ is ‘deeply embedded within the political psyche of a large group of British citizens’.Footnote ⁷¹ But interpretations of Britain’s imperial past shaped arguments both for and against membership in the EU. The EU could be presented in two contrasting ways, either as an obstacle to or a vehicle for Britain’s imperial ambitions. As has been said, this ambiguity ‘requires us to recognise post-imperial patterns of thought, not as a psychological affliction to which only half the population is subject, but as a common cultural inheritance through which all sides think and argue’.Footnote ⁷² In the case of Britain, we may thus speak of post-imperial sovereignty, not having in mind any doctrine but something crucial about British political culture, namely, that the question of sovereignty is there embedded in particular patterns of thought. These patterns do not yield any consistent set of political views, nor even a belief in the value of sovereignty as traditionally understood. Britain’s attitude to European integration has been aptly described as ‘Euro-equivocation’.Footnote ⁷³

If we distinguish between general patterns of thought, or political languages, on the one hand, and particular arguments formulated within these languages, on the other, then the idea of post-traumatic sovereignty would belong to the level shared by various political camps existing within a country. This means that it cannot be understood as a worldview with a set of clear-cut beliefs about what endangers sovereignty and how to best protect it. Such beliefs pertain to the level where disagreements appear about the central problem, namely, how to ensure that political independence is not lost. On this reading, it becomes much less problematic to portray the idea of post-traumatic sovereignty as a regional phenomenon. Countries in East-Central Europe cannot be lumped together meaningfully for all purposes. What Kuisz claims is that, despite all the differences between their individual historical experiences, countries in this region are similar in being small nations in the sense used by Kundera – they share a feeling of existential danger derived from these experiences. This does not condition these countries to adopt any single position on the value of retaining unlimited independence as opposed to joining some larger organisation. The imaginary of misery can accommodate a whole variety of positions, depending on how the predicament attributed to the nation is articulated in political and legal terms. Even assuming attachment to national independence as a vague general goal, it leaves open a series of hard problems. What exactly is independence? Is it captured by the legal concept of sovereignty? Can it be hollowed out in a federal organisation? Consensus cannot be expected on such questions, since they express ambiguities in the very idea of sovereignty. When threats are seen to emanate from various sources, not merely from legal limitations on decision making, then the same political position (for example, joining a federation) can be seen as either compromising or protecting sovereignty. In the presence of such difficulties, it is surely equivocation we should expect, not consistency and agreement.

4.4 Post-Communism and the ‘Sovereignty Conundrum’

In the light of what has been said, we can also form a better understanding of an apparent inconsistency in the behaviour of post-Soviet countries or what Wojciech Sadurski has called the ‘sovereignty conundrum’, referring to an irony he noted in the eastern enlargement of the EU. ‘Countries with a proud national history’, wrote Sadurski in 2004,

Indeed, how can this be explained? How to account for the wish of post-communist countries to join the EU when, as several authors have claimed, theirs was an old-fashioned sovereigntist outlook, either because East-Central Europe had missed the aggiornamento of constitutional imagination that the West had experienced since the 1950s or because the Soviet era itself had produced a form of constitutionalism that favours an archaic conception of nation-statehood? According to Signe Larsen, one important effect of the Soviet period was to ingrain the idea that threats to democracy emanate primarily from foreign oppressors (from ‘them’, not ‘us’). Hence the image of a pure, ethnically defined nation, deserving of unlimited freedom, and the ‘constitutional emphasis on nationalism and sovereignty’.Footnote ⁷⁵ But, if so, there really is a puzzle. If the mindset of the post-Soviet countries was ‘incompatible with the constitutional reality of the Union they were acceding to’, as Rehling says,Footnote ⁷⁶ how could these countries not merely join the EU but subscribe to even deeper forms of integration later?

Different explanations have been offered for the ‘sovereignty conundrum’. Anneli Albi maintains that it was in virtue of some strange naiveté that lawyers in East-Central Europe failed to make their idea of national sovereignty a serious obstacle to the process of accession to the EU. ‘Although constitutional awareness about the EU gained ground as accession drew closer, Central and Eastern European scholars tended to devote minimal space to analysing the nature of the EU polity, and to view the Union therefore merely as an international organisation or a confederation of states, finding that it would not significantly affect national sovereignty.’Footnote ⁷⁷ Sadurski detected more strategy in the efforts to show that accession to the EU actually involves no loss of sovereignty. In his view, the role of scholars has been either to back up with constitutional arguments political choices made for other reasons or to influence decisions by helping to convince the political class and the society at large that their traditionalist ideas regarding sovereignty and the nation are not at all incompatible with European integration. Thus, some commentators downplayed the unique character of the EU, pointing out that all international treaties entail a surrender of sovereign rights – this being depicted itself an exercise of sovereignty – and emphasising that the difference is simply one of degree. It was also said that some important powers were retained by Member States or that the transfer was not irrevocable. ‘In conclusion’, writes Sadurski,

One difficulty with such explanations is that they make an assumption about what the reality is with regard to the EU, namely, that it involves a loss of sovereignty, so that there must appear an element of deception or at least artificiality in the work of constitutional lawyers who deny this. As a matter of fact, sovereignty is a contested idea and the multiplicity of its meanings can produce genuine disagreements about its continuing relevance, even in an organisation as deeply integrated as the EU.Footnote ⁷⁹ From the point of view of constitutional imaginaries, the more important point is this, however: such explanations also assume too much about what can be deduced from the kind of lofty rhetoric encountered in constitutional texts. There is little doubt that some of the constitutions in East-Central Europe celebrate sovereignty in exalted terms. For example, the preamble to the Polish constitution (1997) reads: ‘Homeland, which recovered, in 1989, the possibility of a sovereign and democratic determination of its fate …’. This line conveys a sentiment that can certainly be described as pride and joy in the possession of sovereignty. The late-1980s witnessed an explosion of such rhetoric in East-Central Europe. To illustrate the solemnity that was common at the time, we can recall a speech that Bronislavas Genzelis, a Lithuanian politician, gave in 1989: ‘Until a nation does not regain independence, its existence is constantly endangered. If a nation has necessary conditions to develop its culture, it is alive; if it has its own economy, it exists, but without political independence it only vegetates.’Footnote ⁸⁰ When the Lithuanian Constitution was adopted a few years later, its opening words struck a similar note. As if to dispel any prospect that the nation will have to vegetate again, Article 3 provided: ‘No one may limit or restrict the sovereignty of the People or make claims to the sovereign powers of the People.’Footnote ⁸¹ Whilst it would be hard to claim that such statements do not demonstrate an attachment to political independence, they nonetheless tell us very little about how sovereignty is actually understood in the constitutional culture that informs the interpretation of these texts. Fundamental questions persist. What is independence? Is it enhanced or weakened in a federal organisation? Which concept of sovereignty is best able to capture the predicament of a small nation in danger?

The ‘sovereignty conundrum’ may cease to need an explanation once we discover that there is no objective inconsistency in joining the EU under the cover of independence-minded rhetoric. Let us suppose that the Soviet shock indeed produced, or reinforced, a condition of post-traumatic sovereignty – that is, an obsession with political independence – in post-communist countries. As noted by Jarosław Kuisz, one of the expressions of this condition is a Europeanist position which is quite willing to accept the limitations that membership in the EU brings. These limitations are accepted not because of some theoretical notion of sovereignty or a lack of understanding about the incompatibility of these limitations with a traditional idea of sovereignty. The rationale is that membership in the EU strengthens political independence. From this perspective, there is no conundrum, since it is precisely the experience of foreign domination that is thought to weigh in favour of EU membership. Perhaps too schematically, Kuisz divides Poland into two political camps, sovereigntists and Europeanists, attributing to each a reasonably consistent set of views about how Polish sovereignty should be defended. Both camps are supposedly traumatised by Poland’s past. Both are fully committed to the imperative of not allowing Poland’s political independence to be taken away again. And unsurprisingly, both believe that their views, not those of the other camp, reflect the correct interpretation of Polish history. Sovereigntists look back to interwar Poland, often idealising it, extracting from it what they see as relevant, and project this vision into the future as a model of maximal sovereignty.

To generalise beyond Poland, rather than ascribing a single constitutional ideology or mind-set to a country, it might be more appropriate to distinguish between several competing outlooks, without thereby denying the existence of a common framework of ideas and representations.Footnote ⁸³ The presence of some overarching framework and a multiplicity of views within this structure are both central elements if we wish to recognise the indisputable fact of disagreement and still retain the notion that even fundamental differences of opinion are embedded in a shared collective inheritance. In Poland, the Law and Justice party has directed its loss-of-sovereignty rhetoric mostly against the EU. According to Sadurski, this party possesses a ‘worldview’ that it shares with Hungary’s Fidesz and that it hopes to make dominant in all of East-Central Europe – a vision that ‘is primarily based on a suspicion of the outside world, and on the celebration of national sovereignty as the supreme value in a nation’s policy, which needs to be forever defended and strengthened’.Footnote ⁸⁴ Kuisz describes the ideology of the Law and Justice party in nearly identical terms but he adds a crucially important caveat: its liberal opponents are similarly attached to national sovereignty, only they warn against Poland leaving the EU and finding itself exposed to Russian aggression.Footnote ⁸⁵ Although sovereigntists and Europeanists agree on the importance of preserving sovereignty, they disagree on whether some sort of fundamental equivalence can be established between the threats emanating from Russia and the EU. Those opposing the Law and Justice party are not blind to the imperfections of the EU, nor are they necessarily unable to appreciate the difficulty of reconciling the present configuration of the EU with a traditional notion of sovereignty. What they believe, according to Kuisz, is that these problems are either secondary or merely apparent when compared to the much more serious danger posed to Polish sovereignty by Russia.Footnote ⁸⁶

The collective self-image of being a small endangered nation can be considered as precisely the kind of overarching structure of meaning which operates by framing an on-going debate, rather than dictating any political positions or legal doctrines. To insist on ambivalence and equivocation is not to imply that such malleable imaginaries are without effect on constitutional reasoning. Clifford Geertz has observed that some of the most critical decisions concerning the direction of public life are not made in formal institutions such as parliaments but in the unformalised realms of the collective consciousness, at the level of the ‘conceptual structures individuals use to construe experience’.Footnote ⁸⁷ Whatever their deep cultural sources, it is undeniable, however, that decisions are also made in parliaments and courts. This begs the question of how exactly do the collective images that swirl in a culture enter the realm of formal decisions. Summing up the literature on why national courts have accepted the jurisprudence of the CJEU, Karen Alter has distinguished between two rival approaches: legalism, which invokes legal logic and reasoning to explain national court behaviour, and neo-realism, which puts the emphasis on politics and the pursuit of national interest. Alter criticises both approaches, legalism mainly for ignoring politics and neo-realism for not offering any clear account of how the ‘national interest’ is constructed.Footnote ⁸⁸ One way to bring culture into this analysis would be to assert that politicians and judges are indeed seeking to further the national interest, but that they understand it in a pre-conditioned manner, in the light of a concrete, culturally informed view of what is the situation of the ‘nation’.Footnote ⁸⁹ But even this line of analysis would yield an excessively simplified picture of judicial reasoning. Legal arguments are mostly not a mere dressing up, devised ex post after having latched onto some idea of the national interest. Few constitutional scholars would probably accept the claim that, in assessing whether membership of the EU involves a loss of sovereignty, all they are doing is making some pre-determined decision about the national interest palatable to an audience. On the other hand, it would be equally unconvincing to say that, when engaging in this kind of exercise, their eyes are fixed on some abstract notion of sovereignty which they merely unpack by the rules of logic.

What other frame of mind could there be, then, if legal arguments must retain some force yet also be penetrated by the categories that are used to make sense of collective experience? For clarifying the nature of constitutional imaginaries and their role in legal reasoning, it might be useful to start from Carl Schmitt’s famous classification of different types of legal thinking, in particular, the distinction between normativism and concrete-order thinking. Schmitt claims that there exist some socially consecrated images (or ‘concrete-order notions’, as he calls them) such as brave soldiers, duty-conscious bureaucrats, respectable comrades, and so on, which a strictly normativist understanding (‘rule and statute thinking’) excludes from the law altogether since it considers that they have no direct legal relevance. Actually, says Schmitt, such concrete notions are central to law as abstract rules never enforce themselves but are applied by people in well-determined situations, against the background of concrete patterns of social order which should be honoured, not ignored, according to Schmitt.Footnote ⁹⁰ Irrespective of whether one agrees with this last point (on the need to respect established social institutions), Schmitt’s analysis can be taken as an insightful portrayal of how constitutional reasoning really proceeds. Although this might not be how Schmitt himself viewed it, concrete-order thinking could be seen as being directed by what Hans-Georg Gadamer has described as a ‘fore-conception’.Footnote ⁹¹ Interpretation always starts from some provisional understanding which is later replaced by a more suitable one if the expectations of the interpreter are not met. Like Europeanists and sovereigntists in general, scholars and judges may also be impelled by an impression of where the greatest danger lies given the concrete situation of their nation, without this fore-conception necessarily determining their conclusions about the law. They could have a Europeanist sensibility and believe that military aggression is what really threatens their small nation – much more than any formal limitations within the EU – yet still be swayed by the claim that sovereignty (as enshrined in the constitution) is an obstacle to European integration. Some legal arguments may simply appear irresistible to them. What their fore-conception brings is an articulation of the situation in terms of concrete facts and circumstances. But it also brings something else. Schmitt’s insight was to note that, when lawyers practice concrete-order thinking, they do not apprehend society as a factual realm separate from applicable norms. The concrete situation bleeds into law by making some interpretations seem more appropriate than others.

The ‘sovereignty conundrum’ grows out of the assumption that there is no fundamental difference between the Soviet Union or the EU at the level of the idea of foreignness. As Sadurski remarked, for all its benign character, the EU is also a foreign body. When looking at how courts in East-Central Europe have reasoned on European integration, we see, however, that they do not start from such abstract notions as a ‘foreign body’. In several cases, courts have explicitly underlined that the problem of sovereignty should be approached in a particular way if membership in an organisation such as the EU is being considered. In its judgment on the Lisbon Treaty, Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal maintained that globalisation and European integration had transformed the character of sovereignty, which ‘is no longer perceived as an unlimited possibility of exerting influence on other states or a manifestation of power that is free from external influences’.Footnote ⁹² According to the Tribunal, in protecting the nation’s freedom to determine its own fate, the Polish Constitution confirms rather than negates the possibility of accepting international commitments, especially if they have ‘the compensatory effect in the form of partaking in the decision-making process in the European Union’ or are otherwise beneficial for the nation. ‘The accession to the European Union creates unique possibilities, in our history, of carrying out modernisation projects in the conditions of stability arising from the membership in the community of values and traditions, in which the Polish national identity is rooted.’Footnote ⁹³ Lithuania’s Constitutional Court has described EU membership as a geopolitical choice which ensures better preconditions for achieving constitutional imperatives.Footnote ⁹⁴ The Czech Constitutional Court adopted a similar perspective in reviewing the Lisbon Treaty. It asserted that, in a modern democratic state, sovereignty of the state in not an end in itself but a means at the service of foundational values. After dwelling on the sui generis character of the EU, the Court cited the memorandum attached to the Czech Republic’s accession application from the 1990s which declared:

It might be argued that this passage reveals what is really happening: that courts are presenting an internationalist conception of sovereignty to underwrite a political decision at which governments had ‘irrevocably arrived’. Yet there is no reason to suppose that the Czech Constitutional Court was being insincere or cunningly strategic when it insisted that the country’s independence can be enhanced rather than diminished by membership in the EU since the latter ‘can ultimately lead to protection and strengthening of the sovereignty of member states vis-à-vis external, especially geopolitical and economic factors’.Footnote ⁹⁶ In analysing the Court’s judgment, one commentator focused on the doctrinal part regarding sovereignty and set it apart from these ‘rather political statements emphasizing the necessity of EU integration in the globalised world’.Footnote ⁹⁷ Such a line of separation can be drawn, of course, and it almost imposes itself when law is distinguished from politics, as it traditionally is. On the other hand, in so doing, we also cut off a flow of reasoning that somehow appears continuous and follows a curiously similar path in many judicial decisions where membership in the EU is under consideration. Arguments about sovereignty are not derived but rather framed, prepared, set out as appropriate against the background of some picture of the world where the nation or the country supposedly finds itself. Moreover, even the most Europhile judgments have not refrained from caveats. By leaving it to Parliament to list the competences that cannot be transferred to the EU, the Czech Constitutional Court suggested that there are such competences and thus limits to integration. Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal stated explicitly that there is a point at which the ‘essence of sovereignty’ is compromised.Footnote ⁹⁸ This reservation was later invoked to contest the validity of EU law.Footnote ⁹⁹ To explain such reversals, we again need to look beyond abstract legal concepts, not assuming, however, that another political decision must have been taken and is simply being justified in the language of sovereignty. Both pro- and contra-EU arguments were linked to sovereignty at the time of the eastern enlargement of 2004.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ By studying cultural imaginaries, we are making it easier to understand how such contradictory arguments can still make sense today.