Exploring Possible Encounters between New Governance, Law and Constitutionalism in the European Union

The current European Union (EU) is a highly institutionalized template for integration, equipped with a whole spectrum of different modes of regulation ranging from “hard ” to “soft ” which, particularly in re-cent years, have been pragmatically combined together to develop a hybrid and multi-tiered EU system. The dramatic expansion of the EU’s governance tool-kit and the variety of objectives and internal struc-tures of these EU governance tools have relied on a non-clearly identifiable mix of legal and policy in-struments. These changes in EU governance pose a challenge to the rule of law and its main tenets and do not sit well with the jurisprudence of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) because they occupy an unsettled constitutional space. This space is characterized by a range of possible encounters between constitutionalism and governance. In this context, New Governance forces European scholars to rethink the way the EU system operates and the way Europeanization is being pursued. The paper ex-plores the relationship between New Governance, law and constitutionalism and the problems concerning their conceptualization and further understanding. Its main argument is that a stronger dialogue between what are known as “soft ” and “hard ” regulatory mechanisms may lead to a hybridized EU governance re-gime in which all governance tools are designed to achieve the same set of goals