The concept and conceptions of transnational and global law

The following contains a transcript of the workshop, which was held in June 2015 at the Graduate School of Government and European Studies in Ljubljana, Slovenia. The workshop marked the final stage of Dr. Avbelj's research project, supported by the Slovenian Research Agency, which was dedicated to the Post-modern challenges of transnational law to the European Union. The workshop gathered four leading scholars in the field of transnational and global legal studies: Jose-Manuel Barreto, Mattias Kumm, Gianluigi Palombella and Neil Walker. They have touched on the contemporary most pressing issues of transnational and global legal regulation

What future for the European Union?

Stimulated by the European Commission's White Paper on the Future of Europe, this article engages critically with the Commission's five scenarios. Driven by a normative ambition of equipping the EU with adequate constitutional, institutional and socio-political means for coping with its many crises, the article argues in favour of the reformist vision of the EU's future. It claims that a new constitutional process for European integration should be launched. On its basis the EU would be reconstituted as a union, a special federal constitutional form, embedded in the normative spirit of pluralism. The article presents the arguments in favour of such a scenario and flashes out the reasons for which the many constitutional actors in the EU, as well as the latter as a whole, could benefit from it. It concludes that in the following few months there might emerge a historical window of opportunity for a qualitative reformist leap in the process of European integration. While the way back to the glorious days of the nation state is effectively closed off and the present status quo in the EU is plainly unsustainable, the article sketches a theoretical framework for the reformed European Union of tomorrow

REVISITING FLEXIBLE INTEGRATION IN TIMES OF POST-ENLARGEMENT AND THE LUSTRATION OF EU CONSTITUTIONALISM

With an eye on the changes of immense if not radical proportions that European integration has undergone in the past five years, are there any grounds for revisiting the process of flexible integration and using some of its potentials for the benefit of integration in the future? This is the main question of this article, the purpose of which, in contrast to the bulk of the literature in this field, is not so much to describe or conduct a textual analysis of the flexibility clauses of various treaties, but to understand the deeper or background reasons why flexibility in the EU has developed as it has. The article consists of three parts. The first part traces the historical development of flexible integration. This is followed by a study of the reasons why flexibility has remained on the margins of the integration process. Finally, having examined the EU’s relatively non-flexible past and the reasons for this, the focus moves to its present and future