The groundwork of European power
The groundwork of European power
President of the Scientific Committee
Guy Canivet
Scientific Committee
Alberto Alemanno, Luis Arroyo Zapatero, Emmanuel Breen, Gilles Briatta, Laurent Cohen-Tanugi, Mireille Delmas-Marty, Pavlos Eleftheriadis, Jean-Gabriel Flandrois, Emanuela Fronza, Antoine Gaudemet, Aur.lien Hamelle, Noëlle Lenoir, Emmanuelle Mignon, Astrid Mignon Colombet, Pierre-Louis Périn, Sébastien Pimont, Pierre Servan-Schreiber, Françoise Tulkens et Jorge E. Vinuales.
Editors in Chief
Hugo Pascal et Vasile Rotaru
Publication Managers
Gilles Gressani et Mathéo Malik
Editorial Committee
Joachim-Nicolas Herrera (dir.), Anda Bologa, Dano Brossmann, Jean Cattan, Jean Chuilon-Croll, Pierre-Beno.t Drancourt, David Djaïz, Lorraine De Groote, Gérald Giaoui, Sara Gwiadza, Francesco Pastro.
Introduction
The Groundwork to European Power
How can we understand Europe’s uncertain relationship with power? Is power, which Valéry Giscard d’Estaing opposed as early as 1974 to the concept of ‘space’, which was not sufficient in his eyes to account for the nature of the European project and its ambitions, doomed to remain the chimerical horizon of its ultimate goals? How … Continued
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Europe – An Eminently Legal Power
What does Europe stand for? The answer is far from straightforward, particularly in the face of increasing internal tensions concerning issues ranging from the migration crisis to the primacy of European law and to the undermining of the rule of law. The conviction defended by this issue of the RED is that any reflection on … Continued
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Citizen Power Europe
On the same weekend in December 2021, two simultaneous events spoke radically differently on the conundrum of our age. Both were engineered by ‘the West’, one by Biden’s United States, the other by the European Union (the ‘EU’). Both were framed as ‘kicking off’ a process of democratic renewal at home and abroad, a response … Continued
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Governing Europe - for what purpose?
Primacy, identity and ultra vires: forging the Union through the law without foregoing the rule of law
“Should the application of EU law be ruled out on the grounds that the CJEU has disregarded the division of powers between the Member States and the European Union, as it results in particular from Articles 4 and 5 of the Treaty on European Union (so-called “ultra vires” control) (…)?”. This was the question the … Continued
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The French Constitution and European Union law: An Approach through the complexity of legal power relations
“The Pathology of the idea is in idealism, where the idea obscures the reality it is intended to translate and takes itself as the only reality. The disease of the theory is in doctrinism and dogmatism, which close the theory onto itself and petrify it. The pathology of reason is the rationalization which accounts for … Continued
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Europe’s Future: A Federal Alternative to Differentiation
The article aims to show the negative side-effects of differentiated integration (DI) for the democratic quality of the European Union (EU), to then investigate an alternative model that, theoretically, promises to promote integration and to uphold the said democratic quality. The article’s argument is that DI is the response to the resistance that the integration … Continued
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The Promise and Peril of Europe
Since the 1957 Treaty of Rome, the European Union has been committed to the creation of an ‘ever closer union among the peoples of Europe’. Often held out in the Eurosceptic press as an univocal commitment to further integration, this fundamental constitutional aim of the European Union is actually ambiguous. On the one hand, … Continued
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The Backlash to European Constitutionalism. Why we should not embrace the identitarian counter wave
In October 2021, the Polish judge Agnieszka Niklas-Bibik was suspended for a month only two days after the CJEU gave Poland a daily fine of €1 million. The fine was for failing to shut down the Polish Supreme Court’s illegal Disciplinary Chamber which prosecutes national judges who engage with European law. Niklas-Bibik was the eighth … Continued
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National Courts and the construction of Europe: United in diversity
The decisive role played by the CJEU of the European Union (CJEU) in European integration is often, and rightly, highlighted. As Walter Hallstein, the first President of the Commission of the European Economic Community, wrote, the Community, and henceforth the Union, has “no direct power of coercion, no army, no police. Its only instrument, its … Continued
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State nationality challenged by Union law
In its precise sense under French law, nationality is the “legal and political bond, defined by the law of a State, uniting an individual to the said State.” This precision makes it possible to measure how much incongruity there is in questioning the links between nationality and the European Union, the most obvious answer being, … Continued
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Interdependence, Resilience and Narrative: European Geopolitics of the 21st Century
Since the opening speech in 2019 of the Von der Leyen Commission, in which the president said she wanted to head a “geopolitical commission,” the term has become topical again in the field of international relations. Scholars often define geopolitics on the basis of three key notions: territory, power and narrative. However, I believe that … Continued
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Thinking About and Fostering Europe as a Power
What do we mean by “Europe as a power”? This idea has recently been sweeping through public debate and political discourse, even if I mentioned it as far back as 2001 in a work where I reflected upon “L’Europe, une puissance dans la mondialisation”. French President Emmanuel Macron, during a speech at the Sorbonne in … Continued
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Defining European Sovereignty, a conversation with Pascal Lamy
For a long time, Europe has had a sickly relationship with power. But the claim to “power” now seems to have been assumed by European leaders. The French Secretary of State for European Affairs, Clément Beaune, even speaks of a new “mental and concrete projection towards power”. What is your feeling on this issue? The … Continued
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‘We face a systemic problem rather than isolated violations of European law’ — a conversation with Didier ...
HP and VR: In a decision rendered on October 7, 2021, the Polish Constitutional Tribunal ruled that a part of primary European law is unconstitutional in terms which would suggest that the primacy of European law will no longer be recognized in that jurisdiction. Now, a few months after the crisis caused by the ruling … Continued
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“Everything is geopolitical”, a conversation with Jean-Claude Juncker
When we look back on the year 2021, the American withdrawal from Kabul seems to mark a turning point. The President of the European Council, Charles Michel, shared his assessment at the time of the sequence of events that began in August. What is your assessment? I have not yet made a final analysis. The … Continued
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What agenda for the Union ?
Can the renewed debate on European power lead to a paradigm shift in Brussels ?
For a long time, the construction of Europe has been seen by French public officials as a construction of power. The European Union (EU) could in no way remain a mainly economic and financial organization without a government worthy of the name, or without the usual attributes of international power, including military capabilities and foreign … Continued
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Reframing and Energizing Transatlantic Regulatory Cooperation
Following four years of tumultuous transatlantic trade relations under President Trump, the Biden Administration is taking important, but cautious, steps to improve U.S.-EU economic ties. These steps, including the creation of the U.S.-EU Trade and Technology Council, bring a new focus to transatlantic regulatory cooperation, in a way that thankfully has not (yet) elicited the … Continued
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Europe as an international normative power: state of play and perspectives
Twenty years after an initial assessment, Europe still aims to define itself as being a power whose influence isn’t rooted in its military force, but in its capacity to set rules or behavioral norms that have an international outreach. Indeed, as early as the 1970s, what was to become the European Union was already viewed … Continued
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Digital Sovereignty, European Strength and the Data and Cloud Economy – in varietate concordia
Introduction The journey towards the emergence of a strong Europe (or, to use the well-known French expression, of a Europe-puissance), is understood to be a critical topic by the Member States, the European Commission and the European Parliament. In this context, the European strength in the digital sphere is of utmost importance. Indeed, at a … Continued
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Will the Digital Markets Act allow Europe to regain power over the Big Tech? Probably not right away
I. The sources of Big Tech power In the 1950s the EU adopted a competition law that is still in force. In the 1990s, we began to see the emergence of the consumer Internet, which led to the spur of individual and entrepreneurial initiatives. In 2001, twenty years ago, the EU adopted the eCommerce Directive. … Continued
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Designing a common European business law
It is apparent for anyone who cares to look that, in the legal sphere, European integration is far from being complete. There are indeed multiple areas where the effort to craft a common body of European law must be improved, or even deepened, so that one day the rules governing the conduct of business are … Continued
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European Union’s competition policy: seeking a balance between perfect competition and the fostering of European i...
When Emmanuel Combe, Vice-President of the French Competition Authority, writes that ‘competition policy is, in its own way, a minimalist form of industrial policy’, he underlines the conceptual ambivalence between two types of economic policies: while the former is based on rules aimed at improving market efficiency for the benefit of consumers, the latter is … Continued
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The future of the Banking Union after the pandemic
Almost a decade ago, the creation of the Banking Union in the midst of the euro crisis was hailed as the confirmation of the deepest commitment of the Member States to European integration. The transfer of supervisory powers to the ECB was meant to tackle the crisis by enabling risk-sharing with regard to the banking … Continued
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Shaping the rules of our digital future: is the EU on the right track?
By all accounts, one of the leading concerns of EU regulators today is to foster an economy that is both innovative, and sustainable. But let us start with an assessment of the problem: the EU is still arguably a powerhouse when it comes to innovation, but a very rapidly declining one, with very few big … Continued
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Will Europe Set the Sustainability Standard Worldwide?
Introduction The European Commission has pointed out that we are increasingly confronted by the consequences of climate change and resource depletion. It therefore wants more investment in ‘green’ companies and products. In its initial Sustainable Finance Action Plan (SFAP) of March 2018, the Commission states that as the financial sector acts as an intermediary … Continued
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The democratisation of EU nature governance: Making EU nature law more effective?
Introduction The EU has some of the world’s most ambitious environmental laws on its books, but their effectiveness is seriously weakened by non-compliance in practice. Poor implementation is one of the major weaknesses of the EU’s environmental policy. With the UNECE Aarhus Convention (1998), Europe launched an innovative legal experiment, democratising environmental enforcement by conferring … Continued
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Climate Justice in Europe: The Growing Role of Courts
With the Green Deal, the Climate Law, the European taxonomy, the 14 directives either new or to be modified, Europe has undoubtedly taken the measure of the scale of the climate challenge and initiated a profound legal reform to adapt the texts to the objectives that have been set, that is, to reduce greenhouse gas … Continued
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The emergence of illiberal constitutionalism and illiberal legality in Europe: what is happening and what can the EU do ...
Introduction The ongoing political events in Poland and Hungary attest to a serious deterioration of the rule of law, which is unsettling for all the supporters of substantive constitutional democracy with all its components: the rule of law, democracy and protection of human rights. As the legal and political debates between the Polish and the … Continued
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Europe is Sleepwalking in an Unsustainable and Fragile World
Jean-Yves Heurtebise: In its blind march towards the abyss, there is nothing more than a thin layer of ice standing between mankind and nothingness in a world that struggles to support our weight. The new epistemological, epidemiological, and energetic state of crisis makes reflection an urgent need. It is an ever-growing emergency in the face … Continued
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Solidarity Deficit, Refugee Protection Backsliding, and EU’s Shifting Borders: The Future of Asylum in the EU?
There is a refugee-related crisis in the EU; however, it is not a ‘refugee crisis’, it is a crisis of EU values and governance. Crisis vocabulary has constantly dominated public discourse on asylum in the EU since 2015. The ‘crisis’ is often associated with increased arrivals of asylum seekers to the EU, which peaked during … Continued
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The Will to Power
A dictator such as Lukashenko can send his Mig jets to divert an aircraft flying between two European capitals to kidnap a journalist; or he can bring thousands of human beings from Baghdad or Damascus to the Polish border, creating a “migrant crisis” with no other purpose than to destabilize and manipulate us. Why? Because, … Continued
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