EU Law in the Crises

― Potential to Transform EU Legal Order ―

Abstract

　The EU has uninterruptedly faced the euro crisis, the asylum and migration crisis, and the Brexit crisis in the last ten years. Through examining EU measures responding to the former two crises, this article argues that some legal phenomena found in the context of these crises have potential to give substantial impact upon the current state of the EU legal order. In the first place, in the field of measures for the euro crisis, EU law measures are combined with international law instruments concluded among the Member States. In particular, the Fiscal Treaty is intermingled with and almost inseparable from EU law. Such mixture casts some doubt upon the essential distinction between international law and EU law. In the second place, in the field of measures for the asylum and migration crisis, some of the Member States in the Eastern and Central Europe such as Hungary and Poland have refused to implement the so-called relocation decisions. Their continuous challenges are contrary to the uniform application of EU law and may reduce the high effectiveness of EU law which distinguishes EU law from ordinary international law. Furthermore, recent constitutional situations in Hungary and Poland seems to demonstrate that they no longer commonly share fundamental values, in particular the rule of law and respect for human rights with other Member States, because they do not protect the independence of their judiciary. Their own specific understanding of these values may well undermine the fundamental foundation of EU law. From the beginning of the 1990s, many scholars have recognized the constitutionalization of EU law. Taking the above phenomena into consideration, however, we may now have to think about another discourse to explain future legal order in the EU. This is because it may be that we are now facing a moment that EU law is being transformed.