Sovereignty — out, constitutional identity — In: The ‘core areas’ of controversy of EU membership*

Abstract

The Lisbon Treaty has sparked a new round of debate about the nature of membership in the European Union. Constitutional courts of Germany and the Czech Republic played a prominent role in this debate. Parts of their rulings were framed in the traditional vocabulary of ‘sovereignty’. In this paper, I proceed by showing heuristic limitations of the concept of ‘sovereignty’ in addressing the intricate issue of the EU membership. I will, first, argue that none of the aspects of sovereignty – neither international, nor domestic – is significantly affected by the membership in the Union. Moreover, the sovereignty lenses necessarily put emphasis on the question of the final authority, which legal pluralists rightly reject as misleading in the EU context. This rejection is a result of a genuine “heterarchical” relation between the EU and Member States. As a consequence, the EU membership can be more adequately reconstructed through the constitutional identity lenses. This is what both constitutional courts to a ...