Sovereignty In The Shared Legal Order Of The Eu

How does EU membership affect national sovereignty? This edited volume offers a broader perspective on sovereignty relying on the international law concept.

This volume assesses the implications of membership in the European Union for countries’ understanding of the concept of sovereignty, based on the perspective of the Czech Republic. The starting point of this work is acceptance of the Czech Republic’s membership in the European Union as a basic fact. The goal of the analysis presented here is to offer a theoretical approach to reconciling state sovereignty with the participation of the Czech Republic in the European integration project. To do so, the book pursues an in-depth analysis of the reactions of the Constitutional Court of the Czech Republic to the challenges associated with membership in the EU. Above all, it addresses the following two basic research questions:1. Is membership of the state in the European Union associated with a loss of sovereignty, a sharing of sovereignty, or does it have no real consequences for the scope or understanding of the concept of state sovereignty, such that the phenomenon remains a classical, static and defining element of the state?2. How does the Czech Constitutional Court deal with the specific characteristics of European Union law and what is its stance on the nature of the relationship between supranational and national law?

The topic of sovereignty is contentious, and one of enduring interest. In a world of ever increasing economic globalisation, the rise of supranational regulation and the interconnected age of information and communication technology, among many other developments, have challenged the once exclusively held Westphalian model of sovereignty. The distinction between the internal aspect of sovereignty as expressed in terms of ultimate authority in a constitution, and the external aspect involving the relationship between sovereign states has been blurred. This has given rise to contemporary debates that explore the theoretical and practical implications of current challenges to established doctrines. Evidently no book could encompass the entirety of the contemporary debates on sovereignty. This is a book of essays focusing on sovereignty by a team of leading writers contributing domestic, European and international perspectives. The essays have been written at a time of very great testing of the institutional frameworks at every level: domestic, European, international or global. The book illuminates the enduring strength of sovereignty as a foundational concept and the continuing widespread appeal of sovereignty as an idea.

Author was formerly Advocate-General at the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg.

This book investigates the multifaceted conflicts of sovereignty in the recent crises in the European Union. Although the notion of sovereignty has been central in the contentious debates triggered by the recent crises in the European Union, it remains strikingly under-researched in political science. This book bridges this gap by providing both theoretical reflections and empirical analyses of today’s conflicts of sovereignty in the EU. More particularly, it investigates conflicts between four types of sovereignty. First, national sovereignty referring to the autonomy of the Westphalian Nation-State to rule on a territory delimited by borders; second, the supranational sovereignty acquired by the EU in a fragmentary fashion in a number of scattered internal and external policy fields; third, parliamentary sovereignty understood as the autonomy of parliaments (at the regional, national and European levels) to take part in the decision making process and control the executive in the name of the principles of election and representation; fourth, popular sovereignty whereby the body politic confers legitimacy to decision makers in a democratic system. Through an analysis of the various crises (rule of law, Brexit, migration, Eurozone crisis), the chapters look at how sovereignty is framed and contested by different types of actors, and how the strengthening or the weakening of certain types of sovereignty contribute to shape preferences regarding policies and governance structures in the multi-level EU. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of European Integration.

The essays in this book respond in different ways to questions regarding sovereignty, constitutionality and social solidarity in the European Union. A common theme in the book is a perception that the people and peoples of the European Union have drifted into a quagmire of political paralysis within which essential features of the paralysis – lack of constitutionality, lack of sovereignty and lack of social solidarity – feed off one another. Some of the essays put forward a more positive view. They associate the demise of sovereignty in Member States of the European Union with an emergence of new forms of democracy or new formations of political legitimacy in the complex structures of multi-level governance in the European Union. Between them, the essays provide the reader with a comprehensive study of the key issues of European politics and law today.

The book considers the changes which national sovereignty has undergone through the supranational European integration. In various contributions by renowned academics and high judges demonstrate the serious impacts of supranationality on the EU member states and even on third countries which are connected with the EU by international treaties. It becomes clear that primacy of EU law, the most significant expression of supra-nationality, collides with national sovereignty as anchored in the national constitutions. The studies clearly show that most member states do not fully deny EU law primacy but are aware of the need to find an adequate balance between the supranational and the national orders. The result from the analyses of the authors from various European countries is that the upcoming constitutional paradigm is “constitutional identity”, a concept established by jurisprudence in Germany, France, Czech Republic (without being named so) and debated also in Poland which, herself, denies supranational impact on the national Constitution entirely. Studies on selected EU member states clarify the specific national approaches towards the limitations of their sovereignty as developed by the constitutional jurisprudence (Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, Italy, Germany with comparative references to United Kingdom and France). It is illuminated that traditionally strong sovereignty concepts (UK, France) are considerably relativized and functionally opened towards the integration challenges. Basic issues are furthermore reflected, such as the supranational impact on the State’s power to reform its Constitution, the relation of national and constitutional identity and the national and supranational perspectives of identity. The book also includes Europe beyond the EU by research on the supranational character of association treaties (from a Ukrainian perspective) and on the Europeanization of a third country preparing EU membership (Albania).

One of the main challenges of post-war political philosophy has been to establish the nature of the European Union. The aim of the essays in this book is to demonstrate that the Lisbon Treaty of 2009 has construed the EU as a democracy without turning the Union into a state. Consequently, the EU has neither become a federal state nor remained a confederation, but has rather developed into a democratic polity of states and citizens. The EU may therefore be described in positive terms as a Union of democratic states, which also constitutes a democracy of its own. This revolutionary breakthrough in the theory of international relations is not only of academic interest, but has also direct consequences for the current battle over the euro. The political construction of the EU as a democratic polity of states and citizens is built upon the practice of joint sovereignty. As the economic and monetary Union forms part of the EU, the euro rests on shared sovereignty too. In line with the Westphalian system of international relations, however, the markets believe that a currency must be backed by a state. They regard the euro as a currency without a state and predict that it is doomed to fail. The authors of these essays put forward that it should first be established what the EU actually is before lasting solutions for the euro can be found. They argue that the EU and the Member States of the euro area are the joint sovereign behind the euro. Finally, they suggest that the Europe's political leaders should demonstrate beyond doubt that it is possible to jointly exercise sovereignty without becoming ineffective. Seen in this perspective, the battle for the euro is indeed a struggle for the EU.