A model to the world?

After the end of the Cold-War, the EU started advancing its Common Foreign and Security Policy and Common Security and Defence Policy (CFSP/CSDP), making them part of reform that eventually led to the Lisbon Treaty. The article argues that this endeavour was above all a project of polity-construction: it endowed European integration with new purpose, imagining the EU as a polity that legitimately asserted itself globally as a civilising power. The article investigates how such polity-construction was generated during multilateral negotiations on the EU constitution and what different meanings it took on once inserted in national media debates in Poland and France. The argument is made that EU community-building is more adequately captured when looked at as ‘recontextualising polity-construction’, triggered top-down in legitimations of EU institution-building, than as ‘identity’ emerging bottom-up from societal imagination.