European Law Journal最新文献

This paper argues that the EU legislative process should be used for taking all decisions at European level that matter, banning the various backroads of European decision-making (competence creep) that are currently legal but not legitimate. This is a silver bullet, resolving at once a range of seemingly disparate but intimately connected legitimacy problems across all areas of EU activity, that ultimately result from an incorrectly calibrated state of transnational constitutional democracy at EU level, where certain aspects are over-constitutionalised while others remain fundamentally under-constitutionalised. This is therefore the key transversal issue that the Conference on the Future of Europe and its ensuing changes should address. The paper makes various concrete proposals to this effect, including for a general legislative competence.

The Green Deal (GD) and the Conference on the Future of Europe (CoFoE) are both central to the EU's environmental, economic and social sustainability, even as many questions persist regarding their processes and outcomes. This article considers both processes as essential catalysts for, and tools of, a more polycentric Europe. It specifically wants to harness the problem-definition and problem-solving abilities of such a polycentric system through greater participation, solidarity and trust. By ensuring citizen empowerment through citizen assemblies such as the CoFoE, the success and legitimacy of the GD, as a central part of the EU's sustainability agenda, could be strongly amplified. This article highlights several procedural and substantive overlaps and synergies that present low-cost, high-gain opportunities to make these processes mutually reinforcing. More generally, the CoFoE, and possible future iterations, should be central to the EU's democratic integration and its longevity.

Criticism of the EU’s social deficit has become more vivid than ever following the socially regressive handling of the 2008–10 financial and debt crisis. In 2010, Fritz Scharpf famously argued that the EU ‘cannot be a social market economy’ owing to its institutional architecture, legal features, and collective action issues. The COVID-19 pandemic has nevertheless led to a new agenda combining investment, social concerns, the green transition and more fiscal solidarity. However, a lot remains to be done, it is argued, to bridge the social gap. A three-pronged model is outlined to conceive of the EU’s role in enhancing national, inter-national and transnational social cohesion. The paper furthermore points to where the EU’s action must be intensified to make significant progress on the way to a competitive and social market economy. In many respects, the hard political battles remain to be fought.

This article situates the Conference on the Future of Europe within past attempts at reforming the Union by unpacking its democratic raison d'être and its experimental participatory architecture. After rehearsing the standard account of its genesis, the article frames the Conference as an attempt at creating a new, yet temporary, transnational opportunity structure for participatory deliberation capable of compensating for the lack of a genuine, pan-EU political and media space. While it would be naïve political solutionism to expect that this ad hoc, top-down initiative could magically address the EU democratic malaise, the Conference's embedded experimentalism offers a promising first step towards the realisation of the legitimacy-enhancing potential of participation. Ultimately, the launch of the Conference marks the first explicit admission that citizens—not the Member States or the EU institutions—are the EU's ultimate source of authority and legitimacy. Once Europe's democratic genie is out of the bottle, it will be difficult to put it back in.

National parliaments have long been neglected in the European integration process, although the Lisbon Treaty significantly improved their status. Nonetheless, this article argues that there is still some margin for improvement. This article explains why this situation must be urgently remedied and proposes some pragmatic solutions to this end. It is argued that national parliaments should receive more information directly, that mechanisms to guarantee the collective accountability of the Council and the European Council should be introduced, and that certain safeguards are needed to ensure a level playing field among national parliaments in their relationship to EU institutions and bodies. This would help to address the existing imbalance between the way in which today's EU operates, and national parliaments' limited possibility to participate at the EU level.

Should EU values be pursued by means of EU trade policy or separately via other policies? Article 21/3 TEU instructs the Council and the Commission to ‘ensure consistency between the different areas of its external action’, often (mis?)interpreted as a merger of all external policies with respect to values. Is this “merger” justified by the EU public interest? Linkage advocates are interested in the clout of EU trade and investment policy, but not in its objectives. Detailed recent research shows no empirical evidence of the effectiveness of value linkages. Thus, coupling values and EU trade policy may be costly and has few, if any, advantages; its main effect is continuous attention being paid to these issues (seen as a virtue by some). This article includes illustrations concerning the EU–Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), EU/China cooperation on sustainable development and the Comprehensive Agreement on Investment (CAI).

EU Treaties contain an arsenal of purpose-defined and ambiguous competences that are enjoyed by EU institutions, yet devote little attention to the restraining impact of EU competences on Member States' autonomy and policies. While the focus has traditionally been on subsidiarity to deal with competence issues, the judgment of the Bundesverfassungsgericht in Weiss revitalises the discussion on the potential of proportionality to guide competence issues. This inquiry seeks to highlight both the existing traces of competence proportionality employed by the Court to allocate competences as well as the potential of the proportionality standard to temper the spillovers on Member States' autonomy accruing from the exercise of EU competences. While the Treaty restricts proportionality to reviewing the use (not existence) of EU competences, the Court has implicitly employed proportionality considerations to verify the existence of EU competences. In addition, drawing from established case law, competence proportionality assessments could rely on an effect-based substantive review in combination with procedural duties allowing a meaningful balancing of national autonomy against the dynamics of deeper integration.

Despite the constant ‘parliamentarisation’ of the European Union, the supranational dimension of European elections remains limited. Forty years after its first elections, the European Parliament (EP) still suffers from two main problems: (i) its democratic representativeness is impaired by the diversity of national electoral rules and by the predominantly national dimension of electoral campaigns; and (ii) the impact of European elections on the appointment of the Commission remains uncertain, as the so-called lead-candidates (Spitzenkandidaten) procedure is only informal. Today, members of the EP (MEPs) are promoting a double strategy to fix these issues. They have decided to relaunch the reform process of the 1976 Act, notably regarding the creation of transnational lists and the formalisation of the lead-candidate procedure, and they encourage the Conference on the Future of Europe to consider these issues.