The Impact of EU Legislation on National Legal Systems: Towards a New Approach to EU – Member State Relations

Abstract

How does EU legislation impact the Member States? Arguably, no other issue is more closely connected to national sovereignty. However, existing research has thus far failed to deliver a univocal answer to this question. Instead, quantitative research – from political scientists and public administration scholars – has resulted in very diverging conclusions. By contrast, the legal perspective on the relationship between the EU and its Member States has been dominated by a focus on the principles of conferral and subsidiarity, as well as on the delineation and use of EU powers. Such an approach makes it equally difficult to identify the actual and concrete impact of EU legislation. Yet, it is contended in this contribution that a legal perspective, focusing on the actual content of EU legislation, is needed to come to a better understanding of the EU’s legislative impact on the Member States.The scope of application and the added value of EU legislation as well as national discretion therein are three key elements for determining the impact of EU legislation. The scope of application concerns the situations covered by EU legislation; added value regards the question of how EU legislation relates to other (pre-existing, overarching and adjacent) EU law. Policy choices and other room for manoeuvre for the Member States included in EU legislation makes for national discretion. Examples may be open norms or non-defined terms and concepts and the possibility to apply exceptions at the national level to general rules of EU legislation. Three areas of EU law are compared, each with a focus on a particular legislative act: migration law (the Family Reunification Directive); freedom to provide services (the Services Directive) and criminal law (the Framework decision on the European Arrest Warrant).

Can ‘Traffic Rights’ for Non-commercial Air Operators Be Derived from EU Law?

“…If the harmonization level is total, 'the Member States lose the power to derogate from the provisions of the EU legal act apart from the exceptions explicitly provided for by the legal act at issue', according to van den Brink's interpretation of CJEU case law. 75 The flexibility provisions in Article 14 of the Basic Regulation support the notion that derogations -including additional national requirements -are not possible to a greater degree than Article 14 explicitly allows. It follows from the above that the Basic Regulation is a total harmonization measure.…”

Differentiation through flexibility in implementation: Strategic and substantive uses of discretion in EU directives

“…Directives do this by including provisions that offer discretion (which we define as the explicit authorisation to make choices in transposing, applying and enforcing EU law) to member states. Depending on the way EU legislation is set up and specific provisions are formulated, the level of discretion is narrower for some legal instruments and wider for other ones (Van den Brink, 2017a). The central question our article seeks to answer is: what determines the level of discretion offered to member states in EU directives?…”

Perspectives on mutual dependence in plant health

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“…Fig.5 47. Fifty most important features across different approaches to generating background points for models tuned on spatial-block splits for cross validations.…”