04 April 2023
In Law as in Life?
On New Year’s Day in 2002, my late uncle, visiting us in Kerry at the time, walked to the local shop and came back with a pristine €5 note for everyone in the house. Spend it, keep it, do whatever you like with it; but this, he said, is history. Ireland adopting the euro as its currency marked one of the most significant divergent choices in the history of British and Irish membership of the European Union. The dense and complicated ties between the two states were otherwise reflected in so many ways across their EU membership profiles, from their coterminous application paths to shared exemptions from certain legal obligations. Continue reading >>
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08 March 2022
“The Ever Closer Union among the Peoples of Europe” in Times of War
The war in Ukraine has brought a moment of the constitutional reckoning and the ultimate test of belonging for the Europeans. The ill-fated politics of appeasement and dialoguing with a criminal has come crushing down. Finally, Europe seems to take a more strategic and long-term view of its own politics at least when it comes to common foreign policy and defense. A true re-appraisal and reinvigoration of European ideals will however not be complete if the Union keeps looking the other way, dithering, procrastinating when its own axiological foundations are under attack by one of its own member states. Continue reading >>
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17 June 2021
A Hidden Revolution
European data protection law has become (in-)famously known as one of the main tools for both the European legislature and the European Court of Justice (ECJ) to push the boundaries of European integration. The most recent decision of the Court in Case C-645/19, 15 June 2021 – Facebook Ireland continues this well-established tradition. What may at first glance appear as a rather technical ruling might initiate a hidden revolution and lead to an unprecedented step for the ever-closer integration of the EU’s legal order. Continue reading >>
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06 December 2016
A Homeless Ghost? European Legal Integration in Search of a Polity
A member of the European Parliament recently compared the European Union to an Airbus on autopilot attempting to cross the Alps without taking off the ground. Be it the EU’s piecemeal approach to fixing its economic governance post-financial crisis or its inability to speak with one voice in matters of common concern from internal border management to external trade: there is a growing sense of urgency in reforming the EU legal architecture to steer European integration back on course. However, such functional necessities are unlikely to sway the peoples of Europe who – tired of the EU’s attempts at technocratic self-rule – increasingly retreat into the homeliness of their nation-states. From the early ‘no more’ war discourse to the ‘no choice’ rhetoric of late in governing a Union in crisis, European integration has often been presented as a political inevitability. Yet it appears that the most ambitious modern project of legal and political integration beyond the state has come to a halt – where from here? Continue reading >>26 January 2016
David Cameron’s EU reform claims: If not ‘ever closer union’, what?
UK Prime Minister David Cameron claims that the reforms he seeks for Britain will be good for the European Union as a whole. That proposition deserves examination. Here we focus on only one, but the most totemic of his demands – namely that the UK wins a ‘formal, legally-binding and irreversible’ exemption from the EU’s historic mission of ‘ever closer union of the peoples of Europe’. Jobs and immigration might stir the masses in the referendum campaign, but it is the issue of ‘ever closer union’ that divides most sharply the sovereignists from the federalists and could, if mishandled, do severe collateral damage to the rest of the EU. Continue reading >>
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10 November 2015
Brexit, Voice and Loyalty: What ‘New Settlement’ for the UK in the EU?
The UK Prime Minister, David Cameron has finally found time to write a letter to the European Council President Donald Tusk setting out the basis for the UK’s renegotiated membership of the EU. Although in recent weeks, European leaders have complained that they lacked clarity as to what it was that Mr Cameron would seek in these negotiations – despite his recent tour of European capitals – in the end, the themes contained in the letter have been well rehearsed both by the Prime Minister, and more recently by the UK Chancellor in his speech to the BDI in Germany. There are four pillars to the ‘new settlement’ sought by the UK government: economic governance, competitiveness, sovereignty and immigration. The Prime Minister’s stated aim is – through voice – for the UK to remain a member of the EU, albeit an EU with differentiated membership obligations. As he reiterated in a speech at Chatham House to trail the letter to Donald Tusk, if he succeeds in his negotiations, the Prime Minister will campaign for the UK to remain in the EU. He also made clear that a vote for Brexit would be just that, with no second referendum to seek a better deal. So what then are the key policy planks supporting the four-pillars? Continue reading >>
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10 November 2015
Cameron’s EU reforms: political feasibility and legal implications
David Cameron, the UK’s Prime Minister, has set out his objectives for EU reforms in a speech at Chatham House on 10 November 2015 – objectives which he later clarified in a letter to the President of the European Council Donald Tusk. Cameron’s demands fall in four categories – i) safeguarding Britain’s position in the Union’s ‘variable geometry’; ii) strengthening the competitiveness of the Union’s internal market; iii) bolstering the democratic authority of the EU by strengthening the role of national parliaments in the EU’s decision-making process; and iv) ensure changes to the principles of free movement and equal treatment of Union citizens in access to welfare systems in the host state. The political feasibility and legal implications of these objectives differ quite significantly. More crucially, each of the stated objectives can be interpreted and implemented in different ways. Generally, it seems, Cameron’s success seems to depend on presenting reforms that at the same time address British domestic issues as well as strengthen the EU’s functioning. Continue reading >>
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07 October 2015
Cameron’s bid for irreversible guarantee means constitutional chaos
The UK Conservative government’s attempt to renegotiate the UK’s terms of membership of the European Union continues to distress Britain’s pro-Europeans, antagonise its anti-Europeans and bamboozle its EU partners. Continue reading >>
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