There is an ongoing and increasingly popular trend of relying on the concept of sovereignty as a crucial parameter for scrutinizing EU law changes under national constitutional norms. More specifically, debates regarding the future of EU law often seem to be dominated by the so-called ‘sovereignty-related approach’, which reveals a considerable amount of concern expressed by member states’ actors that the evolvement of EU law might lead to a loss, or an unauthorized limitation of member states’ sovereignty. In that regard, the usual calculus on part of the member states’ legal actors consists in the following: as long as changes in EU law do not threaten the state’s core sovereign powers, such changes will be regarded as compatible with national constitutional principles and, therefore, as acceptable. While identifying this virtually uniform approach by highest national tribunals across Europe, the paper will also point to some problems attached to it. Namely, it will show that none of the tribunals that used the identified approach have been able/willing to provide a clear definition of the term ‘sovereignty’. The author will argue that this finding is, in turn, quite indicative in terms of assessing the transparency and, ultimately, the adequacy of employing the sovereignty-related approach in the future, especially given various existing conceptions of sovereignty that may produce divergent results when applied as a part of the described equation.

Law