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The article presents a legal analysis of the EU's COVID-19 recovery plan, adopted to deal with the economic consequences of the COVID pandemic. The plan was proposed by the European Commission in May 2020 under the name "Next Generation EU", was adopted in the final weeks of 2020 and will be implemented from mid-2021. After briefly presenting the sequence of events leading to the adoption of the recovery plan and the political context at the outset of the pandemic, the article examines the main legal issues raised by the NGEU programme. The adoption of the recovery plan was not only a politically bold move but also a case of creative legal engineering. Its architects had to deal with a number of central issues of EU institutional law, including the principle of conferral and the choice of the appropriate legal basis, the constraints imposed by the EU's public finance system, the respect of the institutional balance, and the shaping of a governance mechanism for the plan's implementation.

This contribution to the Dialogue discusses the contribution by Federico Fabbrini, in which he proposes an innovative way forward for the reform of the European Union (F. Fabbrini, Reforming the EU Outside the EU? The Conference on the Future of Europe and Its Options, in European Papers, Vol. 5, 2020, No 2, www.europeanpapers.eu, forthcoming). Given the extreme difficulty of reaching a unanimous agreement among all the Member States on a formal revision of the European Treaties, he proposes the use of international agreements among "willing" States to take forward an ambitious reform. This would take the form of a "Political Compact" among those States, whereas the other States would not participate in it and would not be bound by its content. This contribution discusses the legal feasibility of this "Political Compact" option.

First published online: 15 December 2020 ; This contribution to the Dialogue discusses the contribution by Federico Fabbrini, in which he proposes an innovative way forward for the reform of the European Union (F. Fabbrini, Reforming the EU Outside the EU? The Conference on the Future of Europe and Its Options, in European Papers, Vol. 5, 2020, No 2, www.europeanpapers.eu, forthcoming). Given the extreme difficulty of reaching a unanimous agreement among all the Member States on a formal revision of the European Treaties, he proposes the use of international agreements among "willing" States to take forward an ambitious reform. This would take the form of a "Political Compact" among those States, whereas the other States would not participate in it and would not be bound by its content. This contribution discusses the legal feasibility of this "Political Compact" option.

The concept of the autonomy of European Union law plays an important role in the fundamental rights domain. Autonomy has been expressly invoked by the Court of Justice of the European Union (cjeu) when reviewing international legal norms on human rights grounds, and when denying the possibility for the eu to accede to the European Court of Human Rights (echr). The article also describes other constellations in which the cjeu has sought to preserve the distinctiveness of the eu's approach to the protection of rights but without resorting to the use of autonomy language. The article concludes by advocating a positive rather than merely defensive use of autonomy, namely to describe the distinctive role that eu human rights policies can play in ensuring the effective enjoyment of human rights in the world.

In recent years, leading political actors and institutions have suggested further differentiation as a plausible scenario for the EU's future, in fields such as economic governance, social Europe, migration, tax harmonisation, and defence. One central question is to what extent such scenarios require revision of the current EU Treaties and which ones can, on the contrary, be implemented under the current Treaty text. As the chances for Treaty revision are very remote, the latter option is the more promising. This paper explores the main legal mechanisms allowing for further differentiation, namely enhanced cooperation and the conclusion of separate international agreements between a group of EU states. It examines their legal feasibility and the legal constraints that affect their potential use.

This research paper was requested by the European Parliament's Committee on Constitutional Affairs and commissioned, overseen and published by the Policy Department for Citizen's Rights and Constitutional Affairs ; Study of the European Parliament ; Policy Department for Citizens' Rights and Constitutional Affairs ; Directorate General for Internal Policies of the Union ; PE 608.872 This in-depth analysis, commissioned by the European Parliament's Policy Department for Citizens' Rights and Constitutional Affairs at the request of the Committee on Constitutional Affairs, recalls the earlier debates linking the enlargement of the Union with the need to adapt its constitutional framework, and discusses whether further constitutional reforms, involving Treaty change or not, are necessary when a further enlargement of the Union will take place in the near future. It focuses on three main themes: the Union's decision-making capacity; forms of differentiated integration; and the question on how to ensure respect by all member states for the Union's fundamental values.

After the British referendum of June 2016, the other 27 States of the EU sought to make common cause and affirmed the "undivided and indivisible" nature of the Union. At the same time, many leading political actors (foremost the French president Macron) and EU institutions stressed the need for greater differentiation of rights and obligations among the Member States in the future EU of 27 States. One of the plausible scenarios for the EU's future, according to the Commission, is: "those who want more do more". This article maps the recent surge of interest in pursuing new projects of differentiated integration, and discusses their legal and political feasibility in light of the characteristics of the main forms of differentiated integration currently offered by the European Treaties.

It is often said that the Open Method of Coordination (OMC) is a form of soft law and that it takes place outside the competences of the EU. This Article critically examines both these statements. It argues that OMC processes must, under the principle of conferral, be within the limits of the competences attributed to the EU by the Treaties, and that this is also the case in practice. It further argues that, whereas the OMC does produce soft law instruments in the field of employment, most of the other OMC processes produce neither hard nor soft law but policy documents which may or may not be taken into account by the Member States in the respective policy domains. The Article concludes that the OMC is a form of EU-level cooperation that operates within a legal framework defined by EU competences and the EU institutional balance, but that mostly does not use legal tools, either of the hard or soft variety, in its policy output.

L'autonomie institutionnelle de la zone euro par rapport à l'ensemble de l'Union européenne est davantage marquée depuis le début de la crise des dettes souveraines. Des organes intergouvernementaux nouveaux et informels (l'Eurogroupe et le Sommet de la zone euro) ont été nidifiés au sein du système institutionnel de l'Union européenne. Par ailleurs, les États de la zone euro ont conclu entre eux des traités et accords internationaux pour renforcer leur coopération en dehors du cadre institutionnel de l'Union. Cette autonomie institutionnelle reste cependant limitée, et les projets visant à développer une coopération plus poussée dans un cadre institutionnel propre à la zone euro resteront difficiles à réaliser.

Since the beginnings of the sovereign debt crisis, the institutional autonomy of the Eurozone within the broader European Union has been more pronounced. New and informal intergovernmental bodies (the Eurogroup, the Summit of the Eurozone) have nested within the institutional structure of the European Union. On the other hand, the member states of the Eurozone have signed treaties and international agreements in order to strengthen their cooperation outside the institutional framework of the Union. However, this institutional autonomy remains limited and the projects aiming to develop a closer cooperation within an institutional framework specific to the Eurozone will prove difficult to achieve. Adapted from the source document.