European Integration and Political Evolution of the Modern Nation-State

Abstract

This paper draw attention to the fact that the current processes of the convergence of national legal systems within the EU have their source beyond contemporary political integration of the Old Continent. Contemporary European integration is merely one stage of the processes that are launched over a longer period and develop in a way that is not accidental. The cultural choices that triggered integration processes make the process hardly manageable in political terms but rather predetermine political choices. Therefore, institutions having some primary constitutional functions appear to provide a concurrently important contribution to parallel and more important socio-political processes. First, it concerns judicial bodies providing a review of the actions taken by public authorities. The performance of those duties reveals its important function in the political subordination of national authorities to the authorities providing legal patterns for such a judicial review. In this way, administrative courts played an important role in the emergence of parliamentary states in the 20th century, whereas constitutional courts played a key role in the process of transposing sovereign competencies from nation-states to institutions operating at the supranational level. This process of the vertical transposition of sovereign powers beyond nationstates continues even when constitutional courts declare their determination to protect the sovereign position of their national constitutions, as the process is already too advanced to be stopped. Parallel political process leads to attributing the European Parliament with sovereign legislative powers, simultaneously reducing the importance of the legitimacy attributed to the EU by national governments. In this way, a postmodern supranational state is emerging. Even if this process assumes some transitional periods suggesting its lowering down or some alternative paths of the integration, the only possible endpoint seems to be a unified supranational European parliamentary state. Moreover, it seems hardly possible to prevent this process otherwise than through a radical change in intellectual culture that predetermines contingent political actions.