Sovereignty in Conflict: Political, Constitutional and Economic Dilemmas in the EU

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book’s distinctive approach to conflicts of sovereignty in the European Union, and show how it was employed or challenged by the various contributors to the volume. Three types of sovereignty conflicts are distinguished: foundational, institutional, and territorial. Whereas the foundational principle of popular sovereignty has remained unchallenged, there has been a proliferation of institutional and territorial conflicts of sovereignty in the EU, driven by claims to popular sovereignty, but also to state sovereignty, parliamentary sovereignty and supranational sovereignty. Political parties across both Western and Eastern Europe have increasingly mobilized such sovereignty claims within inter-party competition to oppose the EU (as seen in the case of Brexit; radical right and radical left opposition to the EU in France; and Hungary and Poland’s confrontation with EU institutions on the rule of law), but also to demand constitutional changes such as regional independence (the case of Catalonia), parliamentary reforms (in Italy and Bulgaria) and more direct democratic mechanisms (in Germany).