European Union
Valediction – forbidding mourning thoughts on leaving the European Union
Britain and Denmark; my education in the European Union’s laws at its university in the
I have made professional visits to the EU’s four main institutions, and have for
was one of the authors of the EU Constitution (the Lisbon Treaty as it became
equate to belief in membership of the European Union
The flaws of the EU are as extensive as the corpus of
national constitution. Yet they are basic to EU law
the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU has always been a particularly acute moral
makes it equally fundamental law that the EU itself shall be precisely what it outlaws
But perhaps even more basically, the EU has been judged undemocratic, by minds as
Foot. The point comes down to this: EU laws are not made by and at
of member-states’ wish to constrain the EU’s power as out of a policy
through the agency of unelected officialdom. The EU could be rendered absolutely democratic, by endowing
the EU Parliament with absolute sovereignty – but the coalition
accountability, and accountability to democracy. Here the EU fails. Who shall narrate its Co-decision
207 T.F.EU?; Commission legislation under Treaty powers?; Commission legislation
Remainers have seemed able to explain how EU laws are made, while people marched in
Is the alienating complexity of EU legislative procedure undemocratic? In the Venetian Republic
effects is the over-reaching detail of EU regulation of ordinary life. Less could have
of art. 5 of the Treaty on European Union’s verbose failure to articulate a chief
ranking of constitutions as literary works, the EU treaties have ended up looking more like
be better ways of doing things. But EU harmonization and established nation-state democracy could
a model which, on the whole, the EU rejected. In private law, the admirable work
each community that its law - native or EU-harmonized – is its own, because it is
parodied it – as the written body of EU law, which regularly trips up even the
begin to remedy the way in which EU law curiously turned its back on much
OECD, and many more specialist associations. The EU as we have known it may prove
Or it may yet prove that the EU can be the most useful of all
what is beautiful, all long precede every EU Directive and will long outlast them all
No one needs the EU in order to be European. Only dull
text of the Draft Constitution for the European Union, in the European Constitutional Group’s Proposal