Articles
Forever in Crisis? Europe, between Ideals and Reality
The many crises unfurling today — the economic crisis, the migration crisis, the terrorism crisis — have conflated into a single great crisis, which tends to undermine the project of European integration. Although European integration has been characterized as an ideal from the very outset, it has never had — nor tended to have —
Political Crisis
For several years, both at national and EU level, «crisis» appears to be a permanent state of affairs. Beyond the semantic inflation, however, a veritable earthquake is taking place and jeopardizing the basis of politics: the West- phalian model, whereby the State and the territory are the natural receptacle of democracy, experienced crisis due to
Governments’ Two Hats: the State Hat and the European Union Hat
The author seeks to explain the institutional aspects of the crisis currently experienced by the EU, emphasizing the crucial role exerted by national governments within the EU machinery, despite the longstanding popular image of «Brussels» as the seat of an inaccessible technocratic organization. Such a position, that has long undermined the operation of the EU’s
The Euro Crisis and Its Consequences
he article analyses the crisis of the Euro and its institutional implica- tions. The crisis is due to external factors, although the Eurozone’s institutio- nal system has magnified its contradictory effects. This institutional system is rooted in the compromises of the Maastricht Treaty. The first compromise concerns the distinction between the Economic and Monetary Union
The Public Debt Crisis
This article analyses the measures taken to tackle the sovereign debt crisis. These measures have: (i) made existing regulation more stringent; (2) introduced a new mechanism to help States in financial difficulty and (iii) developed a new financial supervisory framework. These measures have not, however, achieved the desired results. Indeed, the new financial governance shows a
The Crisis and the New Administrations
The European Private Financial Regulations, adopted after 2008, repre- sent an important vantage point from which to analyse the changes occurring in the European administrative system due to the financial crisis. This article focuses on these measures and their impact on the relationship between the various actors of the European administrative system. On one hand,
The Crisis of Europe’s Legitimacy and Administrative Capacity
The European crisis has several dimensions. One of these, often neglec- ted, concerns the administrative realm, and is twofold. On one hand, the European administration suffers from a crisis of legitimacy. It has remained distant from its citizens. It has developed without a coherent «industrial» design. In addition, the law regulating its action is still
The Crisis of Borders
In recent months, the migration crisis and the threat posed by terrorism have led a number of countries of the Schengen area to reintroduce internal border controls. The European Union reacted by reforming key aspects of the border regime. On one hand, the adoption of the “hotspot approach” and the creation of the European Border
The European Union and Rights
This article emphasizes the importance of fundamental rights in the construction of the very idea of Europe. It analyses the slow but steady enhancement of the protection of rights in EU law, through the Court of Justice’s case law, Treaty amendments, the European Convention on Human Rights and the Court of Strasbourg, and the Member
«Europe thrives on crisis»
«Crisis» is one of the words that are used most frequently with regard to the European Union. The current crisis, which concerns public power in particular, is still in a phase of growth. This is because the Union itself is a «progressively developing institution», and one which moreover lacks a real executive power. Therefore, crises
Constitution and International Law
In today’s globalized context, the impact of international law, with its many rules that are binding upon fundamental rights, has changed the traditional notion of the constitution as the expression of a State’s sovereignty, in favour of a meaning similar to a «coexistence pact», open to new values and rights from the supranational realm. This
The Judgments of the Constitutional Court (as They Are and as You Would Like Them to Be)
This article analyses the structure of the decisions of the Italian Consti- tutional Court in comparison with those handed down by their European and North American counterparts. The article expresses a critical view in several regards: the absence of any reference to the travaux préparatoires of the 1948 Italian Constitution; the absence of a constitutional
Review
The Governance of RAI and the Reform of 2015
In 2015, the Italian Parliament passed yet another law to reform the governance of the Italian public service broadcaster, RAI (Law No. 220/2015). The previous reforms were passed in 1975, 1985, 1993 and 2004. This article provides an overview of RAI’s previous models of governance and an analysis of the changes brought by Law No.