The economic and debt crisis threaten many eurozone countries and the very existence of the common currency, the euro. The crisis has meant that some special mechanisms have had to be created (EFSF, ESM) and the introduction of special procedures in heavily indebted countries. The deepening of the crisis and the economic recession in the euro area have resulted in the growth of nationalism and anti-European sentiments in EU member states. Resolving the crisis, however, requires further convergence of the eurozone (...) countries, the formation of a fiscal union and a banking union. At the same time, the crisis has shown that the grand theories of European integration, neo-functionalism and liberal intergovernmentalism, have failed to provide answers to the questions raised by the crisis, and this has led to the growing importance of social constructivism. (shrink)

This article focuses on theoretical reflections on sovereignty and constitutionalism in the context of the globalization and Europeanisation of the nation states, their politics, and legal systems. Starting from a critical assessment of the Kelsen-Schmitt polemic, the author claims that sovereignty needs to be analysed by the sociological method in order to disclose its current structural differentiation. The constitution of society may be imagined as the multitude of self-constituted and functionally differentiated social subsystems. The constitutional pluralism argument subsequently reconceptualizes sovereignty (...) as socially differentiated and divided between specific subsystems. The EU's differentiated constitutional domain and the paradox of divided sovereignty are used as examples of profound structural and semantic changes in contemporary national and transnational societies. While the sovereign nation-state institutions have become marginalized in political structures of European societies, the self-constitutionalization of the functionally differentiated EU legal system proceeds by internalizing the concept of divided sovereignty and using it semantically as its mode of self-reference. (shrink)

The institutionalization of ethics and the direct influence of politics on how ethics bodies frame their opinions have been widely recognized and explored in the last few years. Less attention has been paid to what kind of normative instrument ethics as an institutional phenomenon has become in the State under the rule of law, and which institutional powers it has depended on. This paper analyzes the rise of ethics in the European Union context, where ethics, constructed as an isolated set (...) of values, has been exploited for its symbolic capacity to evoke citizenship, has become quite formalized as to certain features, and has acquired the potential to redefine the traditional divisions of powers in the State under the rule of law. (shrink)