La lunga marcia della clausola identitaria. Riflessioni per un esame comparato della recente giurisprudenza costituzionale euro-unitaria

In the last eighteen months, the separate efforts of the European Court of Justice and of the national constitutional courts in defining the normative content of the identity clause provided for in Art. 4(2) TEU walk on opposite directions. The hitherto fragmented, or rather opportunistic, national identitarian arguments point to a single pattern as for the scope and the structure concerned. Conversely, the Court of Kirchberg endorses a twofold, mutable approach: strictly militant, in some cases, but open to constitutional dialogue in others. The work analyses recent national case-law to draw the basic traits of this single pattern and compares it with the approaches of the Court of Justice. Mutual divergences notwithstanding, as it will be highlighted, a common alphabet may be found which has potential to ease constitutional conflicts in the European space.