The intellectual sources of the European Union’s response to the rule of law crisis in the Member States

Abstract

The thesis analyses the legal response of European Union supranational institutions to the laws and policies systemically affecting the rule of law at a national level in the Member States. This EU response, developed as of 2010s onwards, has been meant to protect common values enshrined in Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union, through EU legislation, soft law and case law of the Court of Justice. These institutional reactions have been accompanied by a remarkable number of policy proposals and the normative interventionist EU legal scholarship. Much of academic attention thus far has been devoted to the problems of effectiveness, legitimacy and doctrinal innovation of EU response to the rule of law crisis in the Member States. This thesis in turn frames this response as the new, growing phenomenon in EU constitutional order. It contributes mainly to the critical constitutional theory, focusing on the supranational level of the Union. Hence the thesis traces the paths of EU constitutional ideas, discourse and argumentations, so as to examine how the response of supranational institutions emerged in its actual shape. In the face of highly disputable effectiveness of the mechanisms aimed to protect the rule of law, the thesis suggests reflecting on how these mechanisms are conditioned by the recent history of EU constitutional law. In order to do so, the thesis interprets the current EU response in the light of EU constitutional thought, through its most important discussions, concerning constitutional pluralism, constitutional change and membership in the EU. In this way it becomes clear how concrete interpretative patterns, problems, paradoxes and understandings reappear in the new context of the rule of law crisis. The research therefore deepens our assessment of the recent Union’s rule of law developments and reconnects them to the broadly conceived EU constitutionalism.