Articles for category: Europa

The Kovačević Case Revisited

On 20 March 2023 the Council of the European Union gave Bosnia and Hercegovina green light to start accession negotiations. However, despite this political endorsement, BiH must fulfill the conditionality criteria, including a series of six judgments by the ECtHR relating to the predetermined ethnic keys. The last case, Kovačević v. BiH, was referred to the Grand Chamber in December 2023. If the Court follows its previous case law, this should force the mono-ethnic political parties and their leaders as well as the EU institutions to insist on de-blocking the constitutional impasse for any realistic steps towards European integration.

28. März 2024

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Party Bans and Populism in Europe

In the latest episode in a decades-long conversation about militant democracy, the growing electoral success and radicalization of Alternative for Germany have relaunched debates about the appropriateness of restricting the political rights of those who might use those rights to undermine the liberal democratic order. While it is typical for dictatorships to ban parties, democracies also do so, but for different reasons and with compunction. Party bans respond to varying rationales which have evolved over time. However, a ban on the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany would be out of step with more general patterns of opposition to such parties in Europe.

27. März 2024

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Inquiring into the Technicalities of EU Law

It may sound trivial, but I argue that the technicalities of EU law have been neglected and that an in-depth inquiry is lacking. To see why such an inquiry might be interesting, we must go beyond the traditional understanding of legal technicalities and see them as protagonists in their own right. We need to focus on lawyers’ knowledge practices and to inquire into the transformative power of legal technicalities.

23. März 2024

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A Critical Assessment of How We ›Speak‹ EU Law

Although EU law touches on several profound and complex ontologies of ways of living and being in the European polity, these meanings are usually not reflected in how lawyers and legal scholars ‘speak’ EU law. The reason for this is that EU law is formulated in a strikingly abstract and univocal way, leaving little room for an in-depth consideration of the different interpretations of the law by reference to the various values and conceptions of the individual and social institutions that it underlies.

23. März 2024

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The Janus-Faced Culture of EU Law

Can there be a cultural study of EU law? The notion of legal culture is notoriously tricky. It is both omnipresent and yet seemingly ungraspable. Can we nevertheless hope to dispel the mystery of legal culture, and seize this notion as an object of study? And can it provide a method to improve our understanding of EU law?

23. März 2024

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Studying Migrations and Borders from a Pluridisciplinary Perspective

I chose for years to consider migrations and borders from a pluridisciplinary perspective. Such a pluridisciplinary approach reveals to be demanding: it needs both to be developed with discipline, and to be opened to wanderings. You have to accept to be confronted with personal controversies, to be faced with internal discourse on the method.

22. März 2024

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Europe’s Judicial Narratives

Through the representations of Europe that it conjures up and conveys, the European Court of Justice significantly influences the EU’s self-perceived identity. In that sense, it contributes to the shaping of a European polity, i.e. a European political community united by shared representations about its history and identity.

22. März 2024

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The Triumph of EU Law in Context?

Whereas law-in-context analyses of Community law were relatively rare in the early 1990s, they seemed to flourish from that point onwards. Unsurprisingly, even “mainstream” journals, such as the Common Market Law Review, now strive to attract pieces that combine legal analysis with social, political or economic insights. Does that mean that we are all “contextualists” now? Not in my view.

22. März 2024

Colonialism and EU Law

In 1957, when the Treaty of Rome was signed and founded what later became the European Union (EU), four out of six of the original Member States were colonial powers. An important methodological question for EU law research is how this historical fact has affected the development of EU law. I argue that answering the question of how Europe’s centuries long history of colonialism has shaped EU law is not just a historical exercise but also a starting point for an examination of EU law of today.

21. März 2024

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The Spanish Amnesty, the Conflict with Catalonia, and the Rule of Law

The Spanish amnesty for the Catalan independence movement is a victory for the rule of law, rather than a defeat. It is not an exemption from punishment otherwise due, but instead a reflection of the fact that the acts now amnestied should never have been subject to criminal prosecution in the first place. It is thus also a way for Spain to return to compliance with its obligations under European and international human rights law.

20. März 2024

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