Thank you so much – I'm glad you enjoyed the article. Your own work was extremely helpful to figuring out my conceptual framework!

While the article is principally about the VC, it raises wider questions about how we imagine European constitutionalism and how forms of hierarchy and difference engrained in our constitutional imagination can potentially fuel illiberal backlash.

I look in particular at the differentiation between 'new' and 'established' democracies common throughout the VC's standards, as well as the idea of 'European constitutional heritage' prominent in the VC's work.

The article uses Solange I as a window through which we can critically examine the doctrinal connection between constitutional identity and unamendability that has become so prevalent, and casts doubt on its cogency and usefulness.

I argue that the Court's conception of constitutional identity in Solange I was very different from its later conception of CI in the Lisbon judgment of 2009: Whereas the constitutional identity of Lisbon is strictly tied to unamendability and the eternity clause, the identity of Solange I wasn't.

Such an interesting provision – I had to think about it in the context of a hypothetical ECHR withdrawal a while back and it got me worked up about the temporal horizon of that provision, as well!

To make the field even more confusing, there's also the mass grant of citizenship to the Hungarian minority in Romania by the Orbán government – equally tied to language/culture/etc. but strategically motivated by the interest of establishing a new class of loyal Orbán supporters.

"yeet the rich"

Nice.