アムステルダム条約の第2・第3の柱の法的断面図-深化? 進化? するEU-
1998 年 1998 巻 18 号 p. 24-49,167
詳細
1998 年 1998 巻 18 号 p. 24-49,167
This paper first analyses the main features of the remodified pillars of the EU according to the Amsterdam Treaty (1997). It identifies the Council as the most powerful policy-making centre of the whole EU. Even in the EC pillar, it is argued, the Council's position in the legislative process has gradually become increasingly favourable, despite the “legal” picture to the contrary under the Maastricht and Amsterdam Treaties, which, for example, resulted in the empowerment of the European Parliament. This is mainly because the most crucial stage in the legislative and policy-making process, i. e. the preparatory stage, is dominated by the “comitology”, which is in essence the Member States officials' network subordinate to the Council, and this preparatory stage is free from the control of the other EC/EU institutions and national parliaments.
The paper next points out that the Amsterdam Treaty has brought innovative but worrying institutional features into all pillars of the EU:
a) the decrease of rule of law: the limitation of the role of the European Court of Justice in the EC New Title IV (Immigration and Asylum Policy) as well as the second and the third pillars;
b) the loss of inter-institutional balance of power, i. e. making the Council (including the European Council) the sole and the most powerful decision-making body;
c) the detachment of the Council and its bureaucracy from democratic control at both European and national levels.
It is argued that the cumulative effect of these changes, if and when the Amsterdam Treaty is finally ratified, would shift the focus of the EU's governing power from the formal EC institutions to the de facto network of the Member States' officials thriving under the Council; and that unless we explore a new theory of European governance, the Member States in the Council would become the sole beneficiaries of this silent constitutional change, to the detriment of the other EC/EU institutions as well as the peoples of Europe.
The paper concludes that we need an alternative analytical approach to EU legitimacy, an approach which relies not so much on the nation-state sovereignty paradigm as on the networks of citizens, firms and other bodies emerging both at national and at European levels.
