From its inception, the philosophical-legal vehicle of citizenship has exhibited Janus-like qualities. For Karl Marx, the “first” citizenship of the classical world was a lodestone in the edifice of the “symbolic city”; a legally-delineated status that, just as surely as it included Greeks within the unitary polis, condemned the vast mass of the classical population to servility. The particularism within an originating citizenship paradoxically survived the Enlightenment, as a result of which, the figure of the citoyen became the point at which a Judaic-Christian preoccupation with the inalienable personality of man could be conceptually reconciled with the perceived need to maintain a secular community of horizontal bondage within the republican state. Exclusionary impulses similarly only hardened in an age of nationalism. Even the most inclusive of “industrial” citizenships, just as they expanded the liberating potential of socialized belonging, continued to exclude the alien from their New Jerusalem with direct reference to his lack of communitarian, contractual or “accidental” concordance with the nation.

The European Union rides through troubled waters. Its original reliance on law as the object and agent of the integration project and on the “economic constitution,” which the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU)—as accomplished by the Treaty of Maastricht— expected to complete, have proven unsustainable. Following the financial and sovereign debt crises, individuals perceive the EMU, with its commitments to price stability and monetary politics, as a failed construction precisely because of its reliance on inflexible rules. The European crisis management seeks to compensate for these failures by means of regulatory machinery which disregards the European order of competences, takes power from national institutions, and burdens—in particular—Southern Europe with austerity measures; it establishes pan-European commitments to budgetary discipline and macroeconomic balancing. This abolishes the ideal of a legal ordering of the European economy, while the economic and social prospects of these efforts appear gloomy and the Union's political legitimacy becomes precarious. A fictitious debate between Carl Schmitt and Jürgen Habermas addresses the present critical constellation, where a number of Schmittian notions seem alarmingly realistic. This essay pleads for a more modest Europe committing itself to “unity in diversity,” the motto of the ill-fated Constitutional Treaty of 2003.

It should be no surprise that a case can be made both for and against the legality of secondary market bond purchases by the European Central Bank (ECB), and of the Outright Monetary Transactions (OMT) Program in particular. It is also no secret that the ECB—like many other institutional actors in Europe—is in several ways testing the boundaries of legal provisions as a consequence of the financial and sovereign debt crisis. Still, the Bundesverfassungsgericht (Federal Constitutional Court) Order of 14 January 2014 on the OMT Program is surprising for several reasons.

Preliminary references by national constitutional courts are not an everyday occurrence in Union law. No surprise, therefore, that they attract considerable publicity and give rise to a significant amount of academic comment. However, the recent preliminary request of the German Federal Constitutional Court (GFCC) in Gauweiler constitutes undoubtedly the most important and historic preliminary reference made thus far by a constitutional court. This is not only because it is the very first preliminary request of this particular court, inaugurating potentially a whole new era in its institutional relationships with the Court of Justice and paving the way for other national constitutional courts to make more regular recourse to the preliminary reference procedure; but also because it relates to an issue of central importance for the process of European integration with far reaching economic and political repercussions.