Chapter I 20 T'HE.State of the European Union

2007

The study offers solutions to the crucial European Union´s crisis issue of how to overcome the present deadlock of the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe,giving priority to a short, concise Treaty merging the existing Founding Treaties on European Union and European Community along the traditional line of the dynamic, gradual evolvement of the European integration and cooperation. The author uses the method of applying the lesson taken from the process of dynamically gradual stages in European integration history to current challenges and to the prospects of further reforming the enlarged European Union. The author describes the dynamic stages showing that the Monnet integration method had its successes in European integration,but also experienced its limits, facing a dilemma of how to continue the successful integration process without giving a clear final design of the European Union. The more the EU enlarged with now twentyseven members, the more the doubts about the U...

2003

This contribution addresses the question of the complex legal relationship between the European Union the European Community and their member states. It is argued that the legal order of the Communities forms a part of the Union's legal order. In that sense there is a single legal order of the Union, which may even be perceived in terms of a constitution. This constitution may be seen as overarching everything that goes on within the Union, on the basis of both the Union and the Community treaties. Through the unity of the Union's legal order, the member states do not stand in another relation to the Union than to the Communities. With the Treaty on European Union they established a new international legal person, the organs of which on the basis of decision-making procedures are made competent to adopt decisions and to act on behalf of the member states. As the Union constitution is based on an interdependence of all norms in the European Union (including those based on the Community treaties), it becomes increasingly difficult to make a strict separation between the three parts of the Union. Although this paper was originally written in reaction to a paper by Prof. Werner Schroeder, entitled The Constitutional Relationship between the European Union and the European Communities, it can perfectly be read on a stand alone basis as the arguments used by Schroeder are repeated.

JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies, 2009

European Union Foreign Policy in a Changing World is the expanded and updated second edition of Karen Smith's important publication of 2003. She explains EU foreign policy by exploring not merely what the EU is, but also what the EU actually does in international relations. To answer this question, she analyses why and how the EU pursues five key foreign policy objectives: the encouragement of regional cooperation and integration; the promotion of human rights; the promotion of democracy and good governance; the prevention of violent conflicts; and the fight against international crime. The introductory chapters prepare the ground for the assessment: the first inquires into the EU's distinctive international identity and points to the obstacles and potential for a common EU foreign policy; then the evolution of the EU as an international actor is described through the development of three distinctive pillars; followed by an evaluation of the EU's foreign policy instruments (diplomatic, economic and military-with the latter though meriting somewhat more attention). The following five chapters constitute the heart of the book. Each objective is analysed thoroughly in a separate chapter, with the clear structure of the chapters assisting the reader in the comparison of the EU's policy output. Each chapter examines the internal and external pressures that led to the adoption of this objective, and assesses the mix of policy instruments used to try to achieve these objectives. The approach followed gives an excellent insight into the complexities of EU foreign policy. It also illuminates the many policy dilemmas, with objectives clashing not only with each other, but also with other policy objectives. This leads to a first critical remark-or to a suggestion for the next edition. In the first chapter, the author might have contextualized the five objectives more extensively within the current set of increasingly important competing foreign policy objectives. Moreover, the chapter on regional cooperation (a goal which is now less important than at the time of the first edition) could have been replaced by a new chapter on, for instance, the objective of maintaining good relations with 'strategic partners' (such as Russia and China), or on 'new' foreign policy objectives (such as energy supply and environmental goals). A second remark is related to what Karen Smith rightly notes in the concluding pages of the book: the need for more investigation on the actual impact of the EU's foreign policy on the outside world. In the next edition of her book she should integrate this dimension by exploring not only what the EU foreign policy system actually does, but also what it actually

For the founding fathers the establishment of the European Communities was a foreign policy project. It is therefore not surprising that internal and external Community policies are governed by comparable regimes. In its landmark judgment on implied external powers the Court of Justice paradigmatically rationalises the wide understanding of EC competences with the impact of international rules on internal policies: Whenever European laws are promulgated “the Member States cannot, outside the framework of the Community institutions, assume obligations which might affect those rules or alter their scope.” Also, concurrent activities of the Member States cannot be tolerated, “since any steps taken outside the framework of the Community institutions would be incompatible with the unity of the Common Market and the uniform application of Community law.” To this date, the constitutional foundations of European foreign affairs are characterised by the assumption of supportive parallelism between external and internal policies. In view of the constant expansion of European foreign affairs their analysis however requires a partial detachment from the internal perspective by taking on board the particularities of international relations. Objectives and themes of European foreign affairs nowadays transcend their supplementary character as an instrument for the protection and projection of internal rules with the dynamic evolution of the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) as an alternative point of reference. Its progress is not dominated by supranational law-making; rather the CFSP is typified by the identification of strategic goals and the constant adjustment of methods for their realisation. This condition of international relations explains the legal and institutional regime governing the CFSP, thereby establishing the constitutional dichotomy of European foreign affairs between intergovernmentalism and supranationality (section IV). Irrespective of the novelty of foreign policy and defence integration the supranational Community policies under the current EC Treaty remain the historic starting point and continuous centre of gravity of the legal analysis of European foreign affairs. In the supranational arena the parallelism between the constitutional foundations of internal and external action is most tangible – even if the decision-making procedure and the substantive constraints exemplify a variation on the supranational model. These particularities of international relations law explain the deviations from the orthodoxy of the Community method (section III). It remains a challenge for European foreign affairs to guarantee the coherence and complementarity of the different fields of external action in the daily decision-making practice. This concerns the coexistence of the intergovernmental and the supranational spheres just as much as the cooperation with the Member States’ national foreign policies. Existing legal obligations mandate and support the horizontal and vertical cooperation between the Community, the Union and the Member States; one step further the reform project of the Lisbon Treaty sets sight on the pragmatic connection of the different level of foreign policy formulation and articulation with the ultimate objective of uniform external representation (section V). Coexistence and cooperation of the Community, the Union and the Member States is one particularity of European foreign affairs; their wider constitutional analysis therefore requires a reflection about the background and assumptions of our constitutional argument. They are presented in the preliminary section on the constitutional foundations and particularities of foreign affairs, which cannot ignore the continuous transformation of the international legal and political context.

Cornell International Law Journal, 2001

Nonetheless, the convention has been to refer to this law as EU law. This Note attempts to use the term EC law when referring to particular cases settled before the Maastricht Treaty came into force. Otherwise, this Note uses the terms EU law, EC law, and law of the Communities interchangeably according to the conventional practice. 2. The three original Treaties forming the European Communities are the TRATY

Constitutional Political Economy, 1996

The formal distinction between a treaty and a constitution is much less important than the question of who is authorized to interpret and amend it. The judges of the European Court of Justice interpret the Treaty by simple majority, while unanimity of the member-states would be required to reverse these decisions. The European Union needs a Court whose judges are empanelled from, and selected by, the highest courts of the member-states. The Treaty on European Union violates three fundamental constitutional principles: (i) the principle of the separation of powers, (ii) the democratic principle, and (iii) the principle of subsidiarity.

The Rise and Fall of the EU’s Constitutional Treaty, 2008

2003

The aim of the present document is not to provide a complete commentary on the latest draft being discussed within the Convention, nor that of drafting a full-fledged Constitution of Europe, but to draw the attention of the Convention members and of other participants in the European constitutional debate on some of the legal and political constraints and implications that should be heeded by those drafting the European Constitution. The 'Ten Reflections' take the form of short essays on each of the themes, authored by individual members of the group, who propose and expose their own views on the matter after having discussed them within the group. Most authors have made specific recommendations that are not couched in formal legal language; these recommendations are highlighted throughout the text in bold. Some of the authors have, in addition, made specific drafting proposals for articles of a constitutional treaty; these are highlighted in bold italics. We are confident that this study, which will soon be made available also in printed form, will form a useful contribution to the debate on the future constitution of Europe.

The report summarises the presentations and discussions at the European Union ConstitutionalTreaty conference held at the Moot Hall in Colchester on 3 November 2004. The Conferencewas a public information event aimed at sixth formers and university students as well as thegeneral public. It was also an event to mark the 40th anniversary of the University of Essex. Thespeakers included Essex politicians drawn from local government, Westminster, and theEuropean Parliament, as well as academic experts, lawyers and journalists. The conference alsoheard from the Irish Ambassador to the United Kingdom. The intention was to present a criticaland balanced assessment of the Constitutional Treaty and to contribute to the debate that mustnow begin in the UK, as a European Union member state, on whether to ratify the Constitution.The Constitution will first be considered in Parliament and thereafter the electorate will have theopportunity to vote on the Constitution in a referendum. The conferen...