<p>The Venice Commission is known to differentiate its constitutional advice depending on whether a state is considered a ‘new’ or an ‘established’ democracy. This article gives an account of the distinction between new and established democracies in the Venice Commission’s work and links the distinction to the Commission’s conception of ‘European constitutional heritage’, which confines the sources of that heritage to states with an established democratic tradition. The result is a mental map of European constitutionalism that draws sharp contrasts between ‘core’ states with and ‘peripheral’ states without such traditions, as well as contingent institutional development and rational institutional design. The resulting hierarchies of knowledge and agency between Europe’s western core and eastern periphery have not only become a foil for backlash against European standards but also become entangled in contradictions and paradoxes that need to be critically questioned.</p>