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In spite of a continued increase in the substantive scope and reach of EU fundamental rights, little attention has been paid to their practical enforcement. In this book, Mark Dawson looks at the mechanisms through which EU fundamental rights are protected and enforced, closely examining the interrelation between the EU's pertinent legal and political bodies. He argues that in order to understand EU fundamental rights we must also understand the institutional, political and normative constraints that shape the EU's policies. The book examines the performance of different EU institutions in relation to rights and studies two important policy fields - social rights and rule of law protection - in depth.
This chapter serves as the general introduction to the volume. It discusses two major impasses plaguing EMU in the 2020s: the first, a clash between politicization of EMU decisions, on the one hand, and an institutional structure designed to reject political conflict, on the other; the second, a scholarly impasse between those analysing EMU accountability comparatively and those doing so through EMU specific standards. The chapter briefly introduces the core concepts used in the volume as a means of overcoming this impasse: the distinction between procedural and substantive accountability as well as the normative goods framework developed in Chapter 1. It finally provides an overview of the structure and content of the volume, concluding with a plea to focus scholarly attention on EMUs substantive accountability deficits.
This chapter provides the volumes general conceptual framework. It begins by addressing why new approaches to accountability are needed, arguing that accountability literature has reached a stalemate as a result of an impasse between deductive and inductive approaches to accountability in the EU. It then argues that overcoming the stalemate requires developing a generalised framework of what accountability is for, deriving four accountability goods to be used in subsequent chapters. The chapter argues that each of the goods can be delivered in procedural or substantive ways, focusing either on the process by which decisions are made or the substantive worth of decisions themselves. The chapter concludes by discussing the strengths and weaknesses of both varieties of accountability before mapping out how the concepts will be applied across policy fields and institutions in subsequent chapters.
The Court inhabits a ‘political space’ to which it is called upon to respond. This points to its need to develop cooperative relationships not only with courts but also with political actors (such as national governments and the EU legislature) and even to directly address and explain decisions to EU citizens themselves. This book is aimed at answering the question of ‘How does the CJEU position itself as a political as well as a legal actor?’ with a view to better understanding the work of the Court and addressing its contestation. For that purpose, we explore in this introductory chapter what is meant by judicial ‘activism’ and judicial ‘politics’, before examining the different varieties of judicial politics our authors have shown an interest in. This will pave the way to drawing some lessons on the factors to take into account when seeking to address and respond to contestation of the work of the Court.
The aim of this chapter is to consider whether accusations of judicial activism towards the European Courts are rooted not in the activity of the CJEU per se but rather a wider ‘imbalance’ between law and politics in the present-day EU. Revisiting an earlier chapter, the chapter considers three sources of such an imbalance: the gap between the jurisdiction of the CJEU and the EU’s legislative competence; judicial reasoning at the EU level; and the imbalance in the EU between market and non-market objectives. While the chapter argues that the EU retains such an imbalance, recent developments, particularly the increasing dynamism of the EU legislature, have significantly narrowed the gap between the EU’s political and legal capacities in the last decade. As the chapter will conclude, the EU carries a less institutionally ‘lonely’ Court than in the past, providing the Union’s judiciary with greater leverage to temper activist claims.
The European Union's history exhibits numerous episodes in which Member States have sought to re-enforce their national autonomy in the face of deepening integration. Efforts to re-gain autonomy, however, are often accompanied by legitimate concerns that autonomy will lead to dis-integration or will have wider destructive consequences. The EU thus faces a dilemma. Calls for autonomy cannot all be dismissed as mere populist rhetoric or national egoism but instead represent a legitimate questioning of the degree of uniformity that EU law and politics presently carry. At the same time, the fear that greater autonomy may carry dis-integrative effects is also legitimate -uniformity is not an accidental by-product of the EU's construction but intrinsically related to its policy goals. Giving too much room for autonomy might create an opportunity structure for the loss of collective goods, deficits in problem-solving, and perhaps even to self-destruction.
The EU requires autonomy, but in doing so, it must also avoid collapse. Can it achieve it, and if so, how? Autonomy without Collapse is devoted to exploring innovative answers to this question. It draws together scholars in law and political science interested in exploring how to overcome the central dilemma of preserving sustainable yet real autonomy in the future European Union.
Recent changes to EU fiscal policy, such as the landmark economic governance reform package passed in early 2024, have established a dense ‘coordination space’ that steers crucial social and economic choices at the EU and national levels. This coordination space, however, departs significantly from its historical predecessors. It largely operates within a hard law framework using finance rather than either rules or soft persuasion and peer review as its main tool of influence. In this coordination space, EU law is less a system of uniform rules underlain with sanctions than a negotiation framework where discretion abounds, and rules are never broken but rather ‘adjusted’. As this paper argues, the significance of the coordination space lies not only in its unique governance model and unclear boundaries but rather its increasing centrality to the governance of the EU. As the paper will explore using the rule of law example, even areas of EU law commonly conceived as necessarily insulated from political bargaining are increasingly drawn into the negotiation logic and instruments of coordination, rendering even more crucial a clear understanding of the trade-offs policy coordination implies. By unpacking 8 core features of policy coordination in the 2020s, the paper is therefore devoted to illuminating an expanding battleground within which EU law is being re-defined.