The Evolving Category of Territory: From the Modern State to the European Union

1 The Evolving Category of Territory: From the Modern State to the European Union Teresa Pullano, Columbia University GARNET Working Paper No: 64/09 March 2009 ABSTRACTThis paper discusses the role that territory plays in the contemporary process of European integration. In particular, the juridical notion of territoriality, as well as its philosophical and historical counterparts, are being reshaped today. The right to free movement across the borders of EU member states is one of the main instruments through which this transformation is taking place. Therefore, its relationship with the right to European citizenship raises the question weather is it possible to speak about one European territory which is different from the sum of its member states’ territories or not. We try to find traces of a common, supranational, principle of territoriality looking at the text of the European Constitutional Treaty. In particular, this paper takes into account the link between the European enlargement to the East and the process of constitutionalization: the intertwining of the geographical widening, on the one side, and of the claim for a political deepening of the common institutions, on the other, is here analyzed as one of the main elements in order to understand the reasons of the crisis the EU is currently facing. We make the hypothesis that there is a tension between the modern, “hard” sense of territoriality and the “soft”, idealised notion of space that is most frequently used in the European Constitutional Treaty. There is no juridical term such as “European territory”, nevertheless the modern, national meaning of the territory is present in various parts of the European Constitutional Treaty. There is therefore no rupture between the modern, national principle of territoriality, related to the semantic field of power and of exclusion; and the supranational, more irenic, ideal of a common European space without borders. We make the hypothesis of the centrality of territorial and spatial re-shaping of modern territoriality in the present phase of European integration, and European citizenship, in connection with the right to free movement, is one of the core factors of this rebundling.