National Governments, the European Council and Councils of Ministers: A Plurality of Sovereignties. Member State Sovereigns without an EU Sovereign

Abstract

The contested but inescapable concept of sovereignty is our starting point in an investigation of power struggles at the summit of the European Union (EU). Uneasy references to pooled, shared and split sovereignty collide with sovereignty’s connotation of the purported unity and indivisibility of a supreme coercive power. At the interface between law and politics, sovereignty is the focus of an ‘ongoing dialectic’ between them in a polycentric EU whose variable boundaries are non-exclusive territorially and where sovereignty is functionally limited (Walker 2003:20; cf. 22–4). The results are ‘constitutional collisions’ between ‘sovereignty-encroaching claims’ in a context of ‘contingency, ambiguity and disagreement’ with, ‘profoundly unforeseeable and unintended consequences’ (Walker 2003:26, 28). It is a constitutional discourse that dares not speak its name for fear that would formalise explicitly on open-ended process of ‘shifting alliances and competitions between different geopolitical strategies and different substantive policy aspirations’ of the member states (Walker 2003:27; cf. 30).