Concluding Thoughts

Abstract

This concluding chapter reviews how the grave crisis that has been haunting the Union has exposed the fragility of the European construction, and among all its elements the impermanence of its law, which many see as an remnant from the past—an obstacle that prevents the Member States from returning to the dubious paradise of unfettered sovereignty. This explains all the pressures exerted to transform integration and its law into a more flexible framework of cooperation. The chapter recalls the reasons for preserving a robust supranational rule of law in the Union and explores the conditions required to make it possible.

Constitutional pluralism and judicial adjudication: on legal reasoning, minimalism and silence by the Court of Justice

“…Baquero Cruz suggests national constitutional review could result in disobeying EU law, but only on strongly constrained basis: that is, disobedience would be a last resort political act of publicly well-reasoned dissent justified by fidelity to law, for which the disobedient Member State accepts the legal and political consequences for itself, other Member States, and the EU. 67 Rare and well-reasoned disobedience, unlike a generalised and sustained disobedience, would not immediately equal disintegration.…”