Abstract

Jacques Delors, long-term President of the European Commission during the ‘Golden Age’ of European integration in the 1980s, once famously described the European Union (EU) as an “Unidentified Political Object”. It is a polity that is particularly hard to define. Most have now settled on simply calling it something unique and new, a sui generis entity. What causes this confusion is, in large part, the juxtaposition of the continued fragmented political will of the Member States and their reluctance to surrender competency to central European institutions with the quasi-federal nature of the Union’s legal system, which by many accounts has been ‘constitutionalised’ by the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ)...

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