The EU's Constitutional Overabundance?
Forthcoming in European law Review (2016)
Edinburgh School of Law Research Paper No. 2016/14
Europa Working Paper No 2016/07
10 Pages Posted: 8 May 2016 Last revised: 9 May 2016
Date Written: May 6, 2016
Abstract
This paper reviews Kaarlo Tuori's innovative and important new book, 'European Constitutionalism'. Tuori's study addresses the puzzle of the unusual breadth and detail of the EU constitutional acquis by hypothesizing that the very weakness of the core political constitution of the Treaty of Rome is what has led to later constitutional developments in economic, social and security fields each following a semi-autonomous dynamic. In other words, as the open-ended EU project was never properly framed and contained by the initial Treaty settlement, so its later constitutional innovations have taken the form of independent sectoral developments. This raises the question, however, whether these still and unpredictably evolving separate sectors can nevertheless be evaluated in terms of their functional legitimacy, as Tuori believes, or whether, as I would argue, they continue to suffer from the 'original (and still uncorrected) sin' of a weak grounding in terms of popular legitimacy.
Keywords: security, social, political, juridical, economic, constitutionalism, European Union, sovereignty
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