The crisis of the Eurozone and the risk of default for countries like Greece, Ireland and Portugal has led to the intervention of international and supranational institutions like the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and the European Commission, which provided bailouts under a strict programme of conditionality measures to be implemented by the borrowing countries. The first part of the article explores the nature of conditionality measures and their impact on democratic governance within the European Union legal framework. The second part of the article considers the challenges posed by conditionality specifically to the European Union legal framework-including human rights protection and the democratic principle-both at the European Union and at national levels. The third part deals with the role of the national supreme courts in judging the legitimacy of such interventions, acting as watchdogs with respect to the democratic principle but, at the same time, creating a 'short circuit' of legitimation regarding decisions made by national governments (even if conditional).
Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense (…) and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense com pels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contem poraneity. T.S. Eliot -1921
In December 2020, the EU institutions finally approved the new Rule of Law Conditionality Regulation after a controversial legislative process. The new Regulation allows the Commission and the Council to suspend EU funds in case of breaches to the rule of law that have negative effects on the EU budget and financial interests. This article analyses the new Regulation against the background of the rise of conditionality as a tool of EU governance. It argues, in contrast to some of the first analyses of the new Regulation, that the amendments adopted during the legislative process cannot simply be seen as a watered-down compromise, but were crucial to ensure the legality of the new instrument. At the same time, the EU’s growing reliance on conditionality continues to raise profound constitutional questions that still needs to be adequately addressed in the institutional and academic debate.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.