Is European constitutionalism really multilevel?

In the history of European integration, few concepts have been so fortunate as the concept of “multilevel constitutionalism”. It helps us to understand that the EU is not a State and focuses on the correlation between EU and national law. Multilevel constitutionalism thus supplies the basic theoretical framework for analysing both traditional and new issues. This does not exclude, however, the need to verify its adequacy, descriptively and normatively. Not only is the concept clearly a descriptive one, but it overemphasises the vertical dimension, while connections between national legal orders are increasingly important. Moreover, this concept is not successfully explanatory in a prescriptive sense. Indeed, it places too much emphasis on levels, and the underlying ideas of hierarchy and coherence, absent the hierarchical structure which has characterized the States. Therefore, although the concept of multilevel constitutionalism makes sense of modern constitutionalism as a European phenomenon, rather than a mere addition of the Union to its Member States, it is not entirely convincing. Alternative attempts to conceptualise the legal order of the EU, more oriented towards legal pluralism, are more adequate to understand many of the new challenges faced by European institutions