Ladies and Benjamin, I've got the great pleasure of introducing Dr. Adam Gibbs, who is a lecturer in Southampton, and has done his PhD and a master's in the European University Institute in Florence. He's also an expert in constitutional

theory of the European Union, and I'm very much looking forward to his talk today. Thank you very much,

and thank you very much for inviting me to give this seminar or stroke lecture.

I hope to keep to the 30 minutes and promptly, so I'll begin.

This lecture really is intended to be a defence or a statement about the importance of constitutional thinking for the European

Union.

Constitutional thinking for the European Union has been under attack or has been, in the last few

years, been questioned largely from the

standpoint of new governance or administrative, transnational administrative law,

or sometimes called global administrative law.

And I'll come back to that challenge to

constitutionalism in the course of this lecture. So it's about saying constitutionalism,

constitutional thinking is important. And I might give you a health warning here, of course,

that documentary constitution, which, as we know, has a history

in your opinion, does not exhaust the sense in which I use constitutionalism or constitutional

thought here. So, thank goodness, given that we're in the UK as well. So I want to defend constitutionalism, but I also want to

criticise the way in which constitutionalism is being conventionally

thought about in the European Union. And I want to

say that there is, if you like, a hidden or concealed

problem about constitutional thought,

which is concealed by the way in which we conventionally think about constitutionalism.

So I'll say it again. There is a concealed or hidden element of constitutional thought,

...