Entrenching Global Governance: The EU’s constitutional objectives caught between a sanguine world view and a daunting reality

Abstract

Diverse assessments of the EU's role in global governance suggest a great need for dependable and justifiable benchmarks. This chapter argues that constitutional foreign policy objectives are an important source for such benchmarks — for conceptual, empirical, and normative reasons. Conceptually speaking, global governance is an inherently rule-oriented as well as goal-oriented concept. Empirically, such substantive global governance goals can be found today in many constitutions, including those of the rising powers of the emerging multipolar world. EU primary law post-Lisbon is part of this trend, but also goes further. Next to an extensive collection of substantive objectives, it also puts a distinctive emphasis on law as an essential ingredient of its foreign policy and consequently of its vision for global governance. From a normative point of view, the peculiar features pertaining to constitutional law as a source for global governance guidance, as opposed to policy documents or other law, appear at first sight as problematic. In particular for the EU, facing the challenge of ‘relative decline’ in a multi-polar world, entrenching such an ambitious agenda in its highest laws may appear as audacious wishful thinking. On closer inspection, however, these particular features reveal the true value of the constitutional codification of a global governance agenda.