This is the first in a series of five blog entries aimed at understanding the current political crisis in the European Union through a Schmittian lens. The thesis I advance here is that speculative bubbles can burst not only in the economic domain but also on the political arena. The failure of constituting the EU on a political foundation—that is to say, on the basis of the collective existence of EU citizens—is a precipitating factor for the bursting of what I call its “speculative constitutional bubble.”
A Speculative Constitutional Bubble
In a 2000 Cardozo Law Review article, “Carl Schmitt and the Constitution of Europe,” which developed out of the International Symposium titled “Carl Schmitt: Legacy and Prospects” and held in New York City a year prior to the paper’s publication, Jan Müller raised a question we can finally respond to today, over a decade after its original formulation. “[D]oes European integration prove,” he asks, “how useless the Schmittian intellectual tool kit has become, and, in particular, that ‘Schmittian sovereignty’ remains caught in existentialist, concretist ways of thinking, which have long lost touch with the intricate ‘legitimation through procedure’ or the legitimation through prosperity which some see at the heart of the EU?”[1] In the intervening period, we have witnessed, among other things, a spectacular failure of the Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe, signed in the end of 2004 and rejected at the French and Dutch referendums half a year thereafter; the coming into effect, in 2009, of the Treaty of Lisbon, which focused on institutional procedures at the expense of actual constitution-making; and the ongoing Euro zone crisis, which, as I shall argue, stands for the culmination of a certain economic and political speculation on the meaning, role, and form of the European Union.
At its inception, Telos pursued a specific project as a journal: to serve as a bridge between the world of what was then often referred to as “European theory” and a U.S. intellectual world largely defined by quantitative methods in the social sciences. Over time, the terminology changed, and it is now more common to use the parlance of “analytic” and “continental” modes of philosophy, and if the latter term still clearly points toward Europe, there are representatives of both trends in the university lives on both sides of the Atlantic. In retrospect, however, the question for Telos was never one of a simple cultural transfer or the pursuit of some intellectual equilibrium in which scholars in both worlds would think the same way. On the contrary, instead of thinking about method in general, at stake for Telos was the difference between reflections on the meaning of the human condition, thoughtful explorations of the good life, and what appeared to be an exclusively numerical measuring of the status quo, a positivist description of what already exists, with no expectation of change. 
In the paper I am presenting, I shall focus on how I think the Catholic Church can contribute to solving the crucial issues facing humankind today. I will do so by referring to two events that have marked the evolution of the Church in her dialogue with the modern world, namely, the publication of the encyclical Pacem In Terris, and the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council. We are currently celebrating the 50th anniversary of both events. 
Jürgen Habermas’s objective in “On Social Identity” is clearly defending the usage of instrumental rationality toward the development of a universal morality. For Habermas, the new social identity should be constructed through universalistic moral systems, thereby eliminating possible frictions or incoherence present in modern society. The obsolescence of the state and its replacement by autonomous means of identity construction, such as art, already point to his emphasis on a more particular form of identity construction. 
