In the early 2000s many people believed that constitutionalism could push European integration project to a qualitatively new stage. Some understood the adoption of the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe in 2004 as the Union\u2019s constitutional moment, realising their much wished-for utopia. Then the Treaty was rejected in the French and Dutch referenda and the European Council officially abandoned the \u2018constitutional concept\u2019. Several crises of the Union followed, most of them having direct implications for EU constitutionalism: the financial and economic crisis, the refugee crisis, the rule of law crisis in Hungary and Poland, and of course, the Brexit challenge. The kind of constitutionalism emerging from the last decade has lost its utopian character: the need to adopt a new constitutional settlement is seen not as a further step in European integration but as an obstacle better to be avoided. Some people even see European constitutonalism as an oppressive ideology. Why is this so?<\/p>\n