Sovereignty Conflicts in the European Union

Abstract

Université libre de Bruxelles and researcher at CEVIPOL and the Institute for European Studies. Her research deals with Euroscepticism, parliamentary representation, and the linkage between citizens and political institutions. She is the author of Opposing Europe. Rebels and Radicals in the Chamber (2018) and the co-author of How the EU really works (2018). She recently co-edited a Special issue of the Journal of Legislative Studies entitled The EP through the lens of legislative studies: recent debates and new perspectives (2018, 24/1).

The European Union as a supranational association and the problem of state sovereignty

“…Together with attempts at new forms of regional integration, the end of World War II ushered in a new phase for shifting territorial boundaries, political forces, and institutional structures on the European continent. From the outset, this sparked various political and scholarly debates about the further reconfiguration of state sovereignty, with federalists advocating the unification of former, mostly belligerent, nation-states into a European federation (Brack et al, 2019).…”

“…These crises mobilized collective identities, which some saw them as sovereignty issues, and any attempts to depoliticize these issues had the opposite effect (Börzel et al, 2019). Although post-functionalism does not offer a particular development of the concept of sovereignty per se, it emphasizes the need to go beyond the binary opposition of national sovereignty versus supranationalism and shows how important internal actors and events are for understanding EU integration and its crises (Brack et al, 2019).…”

“…Or should it be perceived as a pre-sovereign configuration that "divides and distributes sovereignty in a way that eliminates the arbitrary power of any single agent or agency"? (Brack et al, 2019). Carmen (2022) points out that from the perspective of defenders of state sovereignty, the EU was a somewhat unintentional and ultimately undesirable evolution of the treaty creating a common economic space.…”

Conflicts of sovereignty in contemporary Europe: a framework of analysis

“…This redefinition of sovereignty was driven by the growing acceptance that the EU would not lead to a transcendence of national sovereignty (as predicted by Haas 2004 ) and other neofunctionalists in the decades after the end of the Second World War (Brack et al 2021 : 6). Nor was the EU merely the sum of independent national sovereigns coordinating their action on a discretionary and voluntarist basis.…”

Border management law in the European Union

“…In Europe, with the process of European integration, the Member States of what is today known as the European Union (EU), started to transfer the execution of some of their sovereign competences at a supranational level, including those competences that relate to border management. 49 This conferral of these competences is a direct consequence of the emergence of the Common Market and four freedoms of the EU, namely the freedom of movement of goods, persons, services, capitals (Title IV TFEU), which are, in turn, safeguarded by diverse policies within the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice (AFSJ), pertaining to, for example, migration (Title V TFEU).…”