The European Union and legitimacy: time for a European constitution.

Cornell International Law Journal, June, 2001 by Brewer, Mark Killian

Introduction

Conceived as a collection of international organizations, the legal architecture of the European Union (EU or the Union) (1) rests upon an evolving constitutional charter arising from the various Treaties (2) and decisions of the European Court of Justice (ECJ). (3) Scholarship on the European Union has wrestled with whether to characterize the political and legal structure of the EU either as a constitutional entity akin (but not equivalent) to a federal state (4) or as an international organization. (5) Both theoretical models inadequately account for the political and legal framework of the EU. (6) These characterizations fail because the current network of European laws lacks the legitimacy of a coherent, democratic formal framework. (7)...

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