In This Issue

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/eulj.12180
• Published date: 01 May 2016
• Date: 01 May 2016

In This Issue

Harlow revisits and resets the debate on accountability and transparency in European law.

Hers is a cautiously nuanced but critically accurate assessment of the transformation of

the system of European governance in the last decade and a half. There have been some

improvements, largely stemming from plaintiffs bringi ng and winning cases before the

European Court of Justice. But one can also observe a slow improvement in the daily

administrative routines of the European Commission. Still, to say it in Harlow’svery cal-

ibrated words,‘praiseworthy though these changesmay be, they are micro-changes, which

do not reflect any willingness to cede real institutional power or true accountability’.That

is indeed the heartof the matter, or to be more precise, the constitutional heart of the mat-

ter. The crises or the ongoing negotiations of ‘mega-trade’agreements (outstandingly, the

TTiP) are clear symptoms of the extent to which Euro pean institutions remai n deeply

unaccountable, despite (or perhaps, I would add, thanks to) the positive ‘micro’develop-

ments. Harlow rightly stresses that there is nothing really surprising about this state of

affairs. Transparency and accountability gains are never gracious concessions but have

to be extracted by sustained and astute political action. It would not be naïve, but rather

suicidal, to indeed expect that the European Union would be an exception to the rule.

Goldoni analyses the constitutional bases and implications of the ‘Spitzenkandidaten’

episode. As the reader will surely remember, quite a number of scholars, politicians and

pundits toutesconfondues claimed that if eachof the political parties contending in the Eu-

ropean Parliamentelections would announce who they would support as President of the

Commission,and indeed the nominated would be thecandidate of the most voted party,a

major step would have been taken towards the democratisation of the European Union.

Goldoni argues that suchexpectations failed to take seriously not onlythe foreseeable so-

ciological dynamic, but also the normative conundrums at thecore of present ‘composite’

European constitution. But while the debates around the Spitzenkandidaten episode may

be said to have been hardly fruitful in terms of transforming Europe’s constitution, they

are revealing of the intricacies of the prevailing constitutional theories of European inte-

gration and European law.

Europe’sprotractedfinancial, economic, fiscal and political crises have not been over-

come at the time of writing. When this issue hits the press, nine years will have elapsed

since the European Central Bank adopted the first measures aimed at cont aining what

would become the present existential crisis of the European Union. If the Eurozone crises

seem less pressingnow is largely because a new waveof crises has hit the old continent.By

spring 2016, it is no longer an overstatement to affirm that the massive flow of migrants

trying to enter Europe from Syria, Libyaand other war zones has become a huge human-

itarian crisis. The inflow has ex posed not only the shaky ins titutional and normat ive

grounds on which free movement of persons was built but also what starts to look like

an ontological propensity of the EU to fail to come t o terms with reality. The latter is

reflected in the colossal disproportion between the estimations of the refugees tha t will

be knocking at Europe’s doors (for example, in the two emergency reallocation mecha-

nisms) and the actual figures. Perhaps even mo re fundamentally, the refugee crisis has

revealed the many tensions an d contradictions at the core o f the relationship between

individual rights, collective goods and public power in European law. If postwar Europe

(and not merely the European Union) was built on fundamental principles can be apltly

summarised as ‘thoushalt not oppress the stranger’, as Joseph Weilerclaimed some years

European LawJournal, Vol. 22, No. 3, May 2016, pp. 270–272.

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