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20   Signe Rehling Larsen European public law order, ‘Europe’ came to represent a promise of saving the European peoples from themselves.

This constitutional vision of Europe is expressed in the German Basic Law, which opens with the German people’s consciousness of their ‘responsibility before God and man’ as well as their ‘determination to promote world peace as an equal partner in a united Europe’. It is this responsibility and determination, it seems, which conveys authority upon the German constituent power and justifies the German people in giving themselves a new constitution. In this way, as the German Constitutional Court put it in the Lisbon judgement, ‘the Basic Law calls for European integration’. Declarations of ‘open statehood’ towards international law, although somewhat vaguer in tone, are also present in several other post-World War II constitutions. This constitutional ‘openness’ or ‘friendliness’ to European law is a core feature of domestic constitutions within the new European public law order. By entrenching the constitutional regimes of the Member States, the EEC and the ECHR emerged as integral to a new vision of stable constitutional regimes in Europe.

By creating a European order of ‘post-sovereign’ states, European integration and EU law made up a core part of a new European public law order that could finally replace the unviable world order of Droit Public de l’Europe. The new European public law order expressed a vision of domestic public law based on the limitation of sovereignty and regulated interstate relations as a matter not of international law but of European law – EEC and ECHR law. But European law was also crucial to the reconstitution of Europe’s relationship to the (former) colonial world. The Community established with the Treaty of Rome included not merely ‘the six’ but also their Overseas Countries and Territories (OCT); albeit with a different status within the new Community. In Part IV of the Treaty of Rome, an association was established between the EEC and the predominantly African colonies of France, Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands.

European integration and EU law were in this way not only integral to governing the relationships between European states, but also to the reconstitution of Europe’s relationship to the outside world. This applied to the world’s two superpowers, but also to the (former) colonies. The new European public law order, in other words, did not merely reconstitute the ‘internal’ and ‘external’ aspects of Droit Public de l’Europe (constitutional law and international law between ‘civilised’ nations). In an attempt to protect Europe’s privileged place in the post-World War II era, it also recreated the ‘dynamic of difference’ between coloniser and colonised, between