THE EUROPEAN COMMUNITY HAS BEEN IN A STATE OF ALMOST perpetual crisis since 1979: a financial crisis, institutional drift, the lack of long-term objectives. Nevertheless the patient efforts to bring back order into its affairs which were undertaken after the European Council at Stuttgart (1983) and tenaciously pursued by the European Commission under Mr Thorn's presidency, as well as by the successive presidents of the Council of Ministers, are at last coming to fruition. For the first time in many years, the heads of state or of government have been able to devote themselves in Milan to genuinely political reflections – to concentrate their thoughts on the future Europe and the means of building it. Even if the dialogue was only too often replaced by confrontation, nevertheless, the debate has begun and is bound to continue.

INSTITUTIONAL REFORM IS ON THE AGENDA OF THE EUROPEAN Communities again, perhaps more seriously than for a decade. The European Parliament's Draft Treaty on European Union and the Dooge Report provided a focus for assessing possible changes to the institutional ground rules and constitutional framework of EC negotiations. A central strand in the debate has been the concern of many practitioners to make the negotiating process more productive and effective, particularly given the prospect that enlargement to twelve wil make the EC more heterogeneous and less manageable. Aside from the constitutionalists, whose arguments for reform are essentially political, the pragmatists can be divided between proponents of better practice and the advocates of some Treaty amendments as necessary means to their end. This article seeks to shed some light on the character of the EC negotiating process in the hope of aiding judgments about the relevance of institutional rules to negotiating outputs.

THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT DID NOT SKIMP ITS PREPARATIONS for the European Council meeting in Milan on 28–29 June, when proposals for moves towards European Union were on the agenda for the European Community's heads of state and government. Much effort went into the ‘Howe plan’, which was seen as a model of British pragmatism: strictly practical proposals and no truck with the proposed intergovernmental conference to consider Treaty amendments or other high-faluting federalist notions. A success proportionate to the effort was certainly expected. But Mrs Thatcher left Milan without decisions on the British proposals, outvoted on the intergovernmental conference and angry with the partners who pushed her into a corner with the Dane and the Greek. It is too soon to unravel what was certainly a tangled tale, doubtless with errors all round and a generous application of Murphy's Law. But behind the tactical and political confusion, one element in the failure may have been the divergent approaches of the British and the majority of their partners to discussing the Community's future development.

IN EARLY 1985, MOST POLITICAL OBSERVERS WOULD HAVE forecast the probability of Constantinos Karamanlis's reelection to his second term as president, which seemed the likely prelude to the election due before the end of October 1985. This, it was assumed, would have given Andreas Papandreou's Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) a good chance to repeat the advantage which his party undoubtedly enjoyed in its convincing victory at the election in October 1981, when a significant portion of the electorate, notably from the centre of the political spectrum, felt that it could well afford the risks of voting for all that was implied in PASOK's electoral slogan ‘Change’, so long as Karamanlis remained at the helm with the special powers reserved for the president under the 1975 constitution. The outlook was consequently for an election in or before the autumn of 1985. In fact, PASOK's victory on 2 June was achieved at a different time, for quite different reasons and in quite different circumstances.

IT IS A COMMONPLACE THAT BRITISH POLITICS ARE AT PRESENT less consensual, and more polarized ideologically, than they have been for a generation. It is also a commonplace that the ideological polarization of the 1980s has its roots in the economic and political failures of the 1960s and 1970s.

THE HISTORICAL EXPERIENCE OF THE SURRENDER OF LEGAL positivism to the prevalence of injustice under the nazi regime and the concern to create a real federation led the founding fathers of the Federal Republic of Germany to create the most powerful Constitutional Court in the world for the control of the formal and material constitutionality of laws.

This Court, a supreme constitutional organ like the Bundestag and the Bundesrat, is organized in two chambers, called Senates. The First Senate has jurisdiction over basic rights, the Second Senate decides all questions of political disputes. Though the Court only acts on request, it does nevertheless play an active role in shaping politics and policy output. The jurisdiction of this Court is the ‘authentic interpretation of the Constitution’ and it cannot be qualified as normal jurisdiction, because many provisions of the Basic Law are open to different interpretations and call for a reference to sources and premises beyond the document itself.