Confederacy for now: European (dis)integration as virtuous circle or vicious cycle?
Working paper
Corkin, J. 2019. Confederacy for now: European (dis)integration as virtuous circle or vicious cycle? Leuven European Commission.
Type | Working paper |
---|---|
Title | Confederacy for now: European (dis)integration as virtuous circle or vicious cycle? |
Authors | Corkin, J. |
Abstract | This paper contrasts three visions of European (dis)integration – nationalist, federalist and confederalist – to conclude that Europeans need not choose between a disintegrative nationalism, or the excessive juridification and hierarchy of a state-like European federal order that subsumes their states into a supranational constitutional unity. The confederal alternative offers a constitutional theory of the EU that respects the historical contingency of the nation state, as Europeans’ chosen vehicle for democratic self-determination – an undeniable sociological constraint on integration – without reifying the nation state in the way that nationalism does. It reads the EU and its members instead as combining to “complete” one another’s constitutionality, in a non-state-like constitutional construct that integrates states (not peoples) through a precarious balance of supranational law and intergovernmental politics. This order obliges them to forgo unfettered sovereignty, reining in their tendency to discount the effects of their democratic self-determination on equally democratically legitimated neighbours when exercising national legal independence in a factually interdependent world. |
Publisher | European Commission |
Place of publication | Leuven |
Publication dates | |
30 Nov 2019 | |
Publication process dates | |
Deposited | 28 Nov 2019 |
Accepted | 26 Nov 2019 |
Output status | Published |
Additional information | RECONNECT Working Paper No. 5 |
Web address (URL) | https://reconnect-europe.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/RECONNECT-WP5.pdf |
Language | English |
https://repository.mdx.ac.uk/item/88q38
33
total views0
total downloads0
views this month0
downloads this month