VIRUAL EVENT: Next Generation EU: Germany's Constitution - Sovereignty and Solidarity

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In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the European Council’s 2020 Own Resources Decision of 14 December 2020 authorises the European Commission to borrow up to EUR 750 billion on capital markets on behalf of the European Union. It requires approval by all Member States. However, in Germany, a constitutional complaint was lodged against the German act of approval, by a political alliance wishing Germany to leave the EU, based on the argument that domestic ratification encroached upon the “constitutional identity” of the German Basic Law and that the Decision to be ratified in any case exceeded the EU integration agenda in a “manifest” and “structurally significant” manner.

By way of a critical comment on the FCC’s Order and its underlying reasoning and outlook, I want to pose the underlying question of sovereignty and solidarity in the contemporary EU. I propose to compare two conceptually opposed perspectives on sovereignty and solidarity: the first one—premised on traditional principal/agent analysis—thinks of the EU as a union based on the multi-level cooperation of sovereign states. The second one, by contrast, argues that we should think of sovereignty in terms of an ongoing democratic-experimentalist process of problem-solving under the condition of heightened uncertainty and mutual interdependence. That condition shapes how sovereignty is to be understood, as it becomes clear that also modern nation states themselves suffer from an intractable democratic deficit, with the consequence that they can no longer be seen as the principals.