The European Community and the Requirement of a Republican Form of Government

The European Community - that is, the factual entity composed of three legally separate communities which has been and still is one of the basic concerns of Eric Stein - cannot be understood without taking into account European history after 1933. As an irony of history, the stage for a new beginning was set by the man who destroyed the old Europe and who was the reason that so many academics left the old country for the new world. This new start was not only influenced by the determination of those Europeans who had lived through the darkness to overcome the dangers of rivalry but also by those European-Americans who were able to build the bridges between the old country of liberty and a Europe trying to find new structures. The role played by lawyers, historians and social scientists familiar with both the old world and the emerging new Europe is a story that remains to be written for the benefit of younger generations

European Integration Through Fundamental Rights

The conception of fundamental rights as natural rights of human beings developed in European legal thinking mainly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and also Immanuel Kant should be mentioned. But it was in the new world that the principles of fundamental human rights were first put into practice. A little more than ten years after the first American declarations, the Declaration des droits de l\u27homme et du citoyen was adopted in Paris; it remains part of French constitutional law today. But, unlike the development in the United States, the French guarantees could not be enforced by judges. The legislature was seen as the last arbiter of whether or not a specific regulation could be accepted as compatible with the bill of rights. As soon as the legislature had adopted a law, that law could not be challenged. In 1958 a very limited challenge became possible, through the Conseil Constitutionnel, but only before the formal promulgation of the law