The constitutional governance of judges : the institutionalisation of a new mode of regulation of the risk of constitutional conflict in the European Union ; La gouvernance constitutionnelle des juges : l'institutionnalisation d'un nouveau mode de régulation du risque de conflit constitutionnel dans l'Union européenne

Abstract

From the 2000s, one can observe an increase of litigations putting at stake a potential conflict between EU law and national constitutional laws. Facing this situation of real – and no longer only theoretical – constitutional tensions, the ECJ and the national high courts find themselves in an ontological stalemate. On one side, status quo is not bearable, because the happening of an open constitutional conflict could endangered the whole EU. On the other side, the paradigm of the hierarchy of norms doesn't allow any legal solution to escape from this status quo. Contrary to neofunctionalist predictions, our study, which develops a constructivist approach, shows that judicial actors don't deepen the legal integration by recognizing an absolute EU law's supremacy, but shift from a legal mode of regulation of constitutional conflict risks to an extra-legal mode, that we call the constitutional governance of judges, based on informal mechanisms of cognitive convergence and socializations. Identity becomes a dependent variable. Moreover, they institute informal spaces for dialogue governed by communicative rationality, according to the Habermassian meaning. The culture of judicial dialogue changes as well: judicial actors develop a semantic of the common belonging and a moral of shared responsibility, and tend to form a judicial security community based on the certainty that constitutional conflict would always be peacefully solved. ; Au tournant des années 2000, on observe une augmentation des litiges mettant en jeu un conflit potentiel entre le droit de l'UE et les droits constitutionnels nationaux. Face à cette situation de tensions constitutionnelles, réelles et plus seulement théoriques, la CJUE et les juridictions suprêmes nationales se retrouvent dans une situation d'impasse ontologique au sens où, d'une part, le statu quo est intenable, car le surgissement d'un conflit constitutionnel ouvert mettrait en danger tout l'édifice européen et, d'autre part, toute solution juridique de sortie du statu quo est ...