Conflicts of Legitimacies within the European Union - abstract In the beginning of first part, the thesis focuses on the very concept of legitimacy. The point of reference is rather a sociological conception of legitimacy. Then, the critical overview of theoretical contributions to the topic of EU's legitimacy deficit is provided. On this analytical background it is held that the democratic legitimacy is indispensable for the Union and that there is a necessity of its creating even on union-wide (transnational) level. Subsequently, in the second part dealing with particular modalities of legitimacy within the EU, the thesis makes use of the conteporary democratic theory focusing on the concept and functioning of democratic representation. The framework for the second part is a spatio-mechanical metaphor of four modalities ("vectors") of legitimacy (legitimation) formulated previously in the literature. It consists of indirect legitimacy, parliamentary legitimacy, technocratic legitimacy and procedural legitimacy. Changes in their balance after the Lisbon Treaty are discussed. The chapter on indirect legitimacy focuses on theoretical questions and then looks into the institutional and legislative development. It also provides an analysis of the relevant case-law of the Federal Constitutional Court of the...

Si l'histoire de la construction européenne a été marquée, à partir des années 1970, par les tensions entre la Communauté puis l'Union, d'une part, imposant la primauté absolue de son droit, et les États membres, d'autre part, revendiquant la suprématie de leur droit constitutionnel, cette problématique tend à se cristalliser depuis quelques années autour d'une notion : celle d'identité constitutionnelle de l'État membre. Pourtant la vertu fédératrice qu'on pourrait lui prêter contraste avec la polysémie de la notion. C'est précisément l'objet de cette étude de droit constitutionnel européen que de tenter de dégager des données du droit positif des États membres et de l'Union un concept empirique viable de la notion d'identité constitutionnelle de l'État membre, inspiré par une grille d'analyse issue des sciences sociales.La fondamentalité, dont l'objectivation passe par la référence à l'histoire de l'État, constitue un critère de définition nécessaire, quoiqu'insuffisant, de l'identité constitutionnelle, quelle que soit la façon dont celle-ci est conçue. Ecartées les formes contingentes de l'identité constitutionnelle qui conduisent à terme au dépérissement de la notion, selon des processus variables, que l'identité soit envisagée à partir de ce qu'il y a d'identique entre les États membres ou de spécifique à chaque État membre vis-à-vis de l'Union (et en dernière analyse vis-à-vis de ses pairs), c'est une conception de l'identité constitutionnelle inhérente à l'État membre qui s'imposera finalement. Ainsi conçue à partir de ce qui est ontologiquement commun aux États membres et irréductiblement spécifique vis-à-vis de l'Union, l'identité constitutionnelle assure en définitive la pérennité de l'étaticité des membres de l'Union et de l'origine stato-nationale de toute puissance publique, étatique ou européenne, en Europe. / If the history of European integration has been marked, from the 1970s, by the tensions between, on one hand, the Community and the Union, imposing the absolute primacy of its law and, on the other hand, the Member States, claiming the supremacy of their constitutional right, this problem aims to crystallize in recent years around the notion of the constitutional identity of the Member State. Yet, the unifying virtue which we could lend it contrasts with the polysemy of the notion. This is precisely the purpose of this study of European constitutional law to try to extract from the data of the positive law of the Member States and the Union an empirically viable concept of the notion of constitutional identity of the Member State, inspired by an analytical framework from the social sciences. The fundamentality, objectified by reference to the history of the state, is a necessary but insufficient defining criterion of constitutional identity, regardless of how it is conceived. Put apart the contingent forms of constitutional identity that lead ultimately to the decline of the notion, according to variable processes – that identity is seen as identical between Member States or as specific to each Member States towards the Union (and ultimately toward its peers) – it's a conception of inherent constitutional identity to the Member State which will finally be stand out. Based on what is ontologically common to the Member States and irreducibly specific towards the Union, the constitutional identity ultimately ensures the continuity of the statehood of the Members of the Union and the nation-state origin of any public authority, state or European, in Europe.

This submitted dissertation thesis provides a constitutional comparative analysis of the European Union and the European federations, primarily the Federal Republic of Germany, Swiss Confederation, Republic of Austria and also basic features of the United States of America. I will attempt to determine whether EU is already a federation, or how much closer it has shifted to a federative type political arrangement. In this dissertation thesis I will try to methodically analyze, which characteristics of a federal state the European Union already meets and if we can put the EU under the category of federations, confederations or international organizations. To achieve better understanding of the context of this dissertation thesis, a comparative analysis of the European Federations is studied from historical, sociological and political science perspective. However the main emphasis here is focused on the analysis of the constitutional and legal arrangements. The first part of this thesis starts from the scrutiny of the origin and development of the theory of federalism in historical perspective, followed by determining the concept of federalism and federation in constitutional terms. Subsequently provided here are definitions of various types of federations and the reasons for their creation and...