Suchergebnisse

What is the federal philosophy underlying the law-making function in the European Union? Which federal model best characterizes the European Union? This book analyses and demonstrates how the European legal order evolved from a dual federalism towards a cooperative federalist philosophy

Is the European Union a legislative giant on clay feet? Is it true that the Union has, with some specific exceptions, no original competence to implement European law? This article analyses the structure of the Union's "executive federalism" in three steps. After a comparative constitutional section on the centralized (American) and decentralized (German) enforcement systems of federal norms, the constitutional foundations of executive power in the European Union are explored. Will Article 291 TFEU provide a reformed textual base for the (new) Union's executive powers? A third section then examines existing constitutional limits to the national (decentralized) and European (centralized) enforcement of European law. Beginning with the decentralized implementation mechanism, a first part of this section looks at the substantive, procedural and morphological limits on the national implementation of Union law. A second part of that section changes perspective as it investigates the constitutional limits on the executive powers of the Union in the form of, for example, the principle of subsidiarity. An excursus briefly analyses the phenomenon of "mixed administration" through a federal lens. And a conclusion finally argues that the Lisbon Treaty will remedy, to some extent, the lack of clear constitutional foundation of Union executive power.

The emergence of the United States of America in the eighteenth-century triggered a semantic revolution in the federal principle. Federalism became identified with a mixed structure between international and national organisation. However, when this American tradition crossed the Atlantic in the nineteenth century, Europe's obsession with indivisible sovereignty pressed the novel idea into a national format. This article analyses the European Community and European Union in light of the American and European federal tradition. It explores the analytical potential of American federal thought in examining the European Union along three dimensions: a foundational, an institutional and a functional dimension. The question of Kompetenz-Kompetenz arises. This inductive approach is contrasted with the deductive approach of European thought. Europe's "statist" tradition insists on the indivisibility of sovereignty. This leads to three constitutional denials: the European Union is said to have no constitution, nor a people (demos), nor a constitutionalism. The very existence of the European Union, often labelled sui generis, has challenged this tradition and, today, European federal thought has gradually come to acknowledge the idea of federalism beyond the State.