The German Federal Constitutional Court’s (FCC) PSPP ruling has met with criticism of unprecedented fierceness: its doctrine, its politics, and its authors have been attacked and ridiculed. While I agree that the ruling has its weaknesses, I also believe that many reactions to it, including the commentary by Basedow et al., are flawed. They frame the PSPP ruling as an abrupt break in time―a revolutionary narrative of old and new, with the decision splitting history into before and after. This frame alters the meaning of what happened. It throws the FCC alone into the spotlight, keeps other actors and narratives connected with them in the shadow, places a huge burden of legitimacy on the FCC, and makes the ruling appear not merely as bad law, but as a political action in the guise of law. I argue that none of this does justice to the ruling or to the politics behind it. This begs the deeper question of why the ruling has elicited such Mosaic wrath. My answer is that courts read “their” political communities rather than merely legal texts―they link law to imaginations of self-government and popular sovereignty. In this social practice, the FCC operates at the thicker end of constitutionalism, with a surplus of authority, legitimacy, and, ultimately, political identity, as compared to the Court of Justice of the European Union, which labors at the thinner end of constitutionalism and must view the FCC, like many commentators do, as an idolater. This, rather than doctrine or politics, is where the “real contradiction” lies. There is no resolving this contradiction through law or institution-building. But the preliminary ruling procedure under Art. 267 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union does provide a form for it to move around and resolve itself.

中文翻译：

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革命、真正的矛盾及其解决方法：欧盟法院与德国联邦宪法法院的关系

德国联邦宪法法院 (FCC) 的 PSPP 裁决遭到了前所未有的激烈批评：其学说、政治和作者都受到了攻击和嘲笑。虽然我同意该裁决有其弱点，但我也相信对它的许多反应，包括Basedow 等人的评论，都是有缺陷的。他们将 PSPP 的裁决描述为时间的突然中断——一种新旧的革命性叙事，该决定将历史分为之前和之后。这个框架改变了所发生事情的意义。它将联邦通信委员会单独置于聚光灯下，将其他参与者和叙述与他们联系在阴影中，给联邦通信委员会带来巨大的合法性负担，并使裁决不仅看起来像坏法律，而且伪装成政治行动法律的。我认为，这些都不能公正地对待裁决或其背后的政治。这就引出了一个更深层次的问题，即为什么这项裁决会引起如此巨大的愤怒。我的回答是，法院阅读“他们的”政治共同体，而不仅仅是法律文本——它们将法律与自治和人民主权的想象联系起来。在这种社会实践中，与在宪政较薄的欧盟法院相比，联邦通信委员会在宪政的较厚一端运作，具有多余的权威、合法性以及最终的政治身份。并且必须像许多评论员一样将 FCC 视为偶像崇拜者。这不是教义或政治，而是“真正的矛盾”所在。这种矛盾无法通过法律或制度建设来解决。但根据艺术的初步裁决程序。《欧盟运作条约》第 267 条确实为它提供了一种移动和解决自身的形式。