Neil Walker (University of Edinburgh, School of Law) has posted Sovereignty and the European Union: An Enduringly Awkward Fit (M Rosenfeld and M Diamantadis (eds) RESEARCH HANDBOOK ON THE LAW AND POLITICS OF SOVEREIGNTY (Edward Elgar, 2025)) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Sovereignty has always been an awkward fit for the European Union in many respects – conceptual, historical, normative and material – its supranationalism has been constructed against sovereignty. Conceptually, the defining features of modern sovereignty, namely self-determining political agency, unity of title, unqualified supremacy, and comprehensive authority, have been largely absent from the framing logic of supranationalism Historically, supranational Europe emerged in response to the perceived security and economic limitations of the world of states – the political form with which sovereignty has long been closely associated. Normatively, not only has supranationalism not mimicked the attributes of sovereign statehood, it has sought to challenge the prevalence of these attributes. It has done so not just through addressing the immediate mid-century legacy of military and economic nationalism, but as an ongoing and professedly perpetual experiment in reconfiguring continental – and increasingly global – political relations into a less state-centred shape. That normative challenge has had a deep material basis. For today’s European Union, expanded well beyond its initial continental market-making jurisdiction, boasts a scope, density and intensity of legal authority in matters formerly within the prerogative of the state that has no equal or modern precedent. These various factors have left European supranationalism in an ‘awkward’ position relative to the dominant form of sovereign statehood, It has been conditioned neither to ignore nor to emulate states, but instead to engage with states, and through that engagement to discover and develop terms which allowed it to ‘fit’ into a global pattern in which the forms and attitudes of sovereignty remain so pervasive. This paper examines contemporary trends across the two key aspects of that awkward fit – internal and external relations. In both dimensions the EU’s relationship to sovereignty is increasingly double edged. For as well as challenging internal and external state sovereignty, the EU, both internally, and – with somewhat greater freedom and increasing prominence – externally, has in certain respects been minded to claim or accept some version or some features of sovereignty for itself in its efforts to find an optimal ‘fit’ within the global state system.