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This paper aims to illustrate the constitutional vision of James M. Buchanan, showing the importance of small communities and the shared moral values in his thought. It may appear that Buchanan, as a defender of contractarianism, has little to do with moral considerations. According to him, however, there is a close relationship between social customs, the constitutional framework and economic policy. He thus advocates the existence of a ‘moral framework’ as an important element in the implementation of a non-expansionary economic policy. He considers that only in small, culturally homogeneous social groups, is it very likely that at least some decisions meet everybody’s approval. He therefore defends a kind of ‘micro-contracting’ (Reisman 1990, 116). By micro-contracting, Buchanan means a social agreement between members of small groups that have substratum of clear cultural homogeneity, able to avert the excessive power of pressure groups: “In the United States of the 1980s there is little moral community that extends to the limits of the inclusive national unit, the nation-state, as such, and which embodies the central instrument of the policy-making authority, the federal government in all of its arms and agencies. There is a relatively little sense of shared purpose among the 230 million persons in the nation. Individuals tend instead to relate to and to identify with communities larger than themselves and their immediate families, but these communities tend to be of subnational size of membership, both geographically and numerically” (Buchanan 1981: 1986, p. 117). Starting from the need of a shared ethical structure and the need to build a political unity heeding of the various national communities and faithful to the liberal principles, what is Buchanan's view on the process of European integration? In “Europe’s Constitutional Opportunity” (1992), he states that European unification must start from the same ‘Madisonian’ view of the American constitutional structure. Not only is it necessary to take heed of the division of the powers of the rule of law, but facing such a large political entity and such a fragmented linguistic variety, European Union must be founded on the principle that every state can withdraw from that union. Buchanan is very attentive to the preservation of small local and national realities that should not be suffocated by a too centralized bureaucratic entity, as it is the case with the United States.