The Maastricht-Urteil: Sovereignty Now

Abstract: The sovereignty issue in European law, which was recently raised again before the highest national courts, poses a challenge to legal theory. The supremacy of EC law should not be regarded as imposing a strict hierarchy within a monistic legal system. A pluralistic and interactive analysis of the relations between the legal systems of the Member States and their common system of EC law suggests instead that the highest court within each system retains interpretative competence-competence. Although pluralist legal theory therefore supports the claim that sovereignty has not passed to the organs of the Union, the same analysis confirms that sovereignty has not remained with the individual Member States either: a more subtle understanding of the meaning of sovereignty and its locus is necessary.