You are here
Home > News > Poland’s place in EU is secure, Polexit is fake news: scholars for ‘Politico’

Poland’s place in EU is secure, Polexit is fake news: scholars for ‘Politico’

Poland’s place in the EU is secure and it is the EU who will have to change under the influence of member states as its future as a “quasi-federation” is questionable, wrote Stefan Auer and Nicole Scicluna in their op-ed for Politico titled “Poland has a point about the EU’s legal supremacy.”

Opinion: Mandatory state – revitalisation? How Eurocrats try to take control of Poland

Until 10 years ago, it was impossible to imagine that any judge, acting on behalf of the European judiciary, would prosecute a country under…

see more

The authors agree with the Polish PM Mateusz Morawiecki that Polexit is “fake news” and that a member state cannot leave the European community “by accident”. They point to the fact that there are no legal grounds to expel the country from the EU, and any attempts to create it would be doomed to fall due to insignificant political support.

The Constitutional Court decision regarding the supremacy of the Polish constitution over the EU law was not unprecedented, as questioning the principle of EU legal supremacy has a much longer tradition. In the opinion of the authors, this trend has gained momentum in recent years. Mr Auer and Ms Scicluna recalled the decision of the German Constitutional Court regarding the legality of the European Central Bank’s quantitative easing programme.

The national court questioned it, even though the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) stated there were no conflicts with the EU law. This ruling concerned a narrow aspect, while the Polish top court openly stated that the whole provisions of the EU treaties violated the national constitution, thus, were invalid.

Furthermore, the circumstances of creating the EU legal supremacy principle are doubtful. It was established by the European Court of Justice on its own in 1964, and has been used by the EU since then. This has been questioned by several countries, most notably, Germany on numerous occasions.

On the other hand, the member states never clearly recognised the EU’s primacy over national law. It was stressed in the paper that the successor of the Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe, the Lisbon Treaty, did not include such a provision, whereas the process of creating a common, European constitution, failed, and the topic has been dormant for over a decade.

The authors conclude that the EU is still evolving and will be shaped not by the EU courts, but by the member states which co-create the community, including, no matter the political preferences, Poland.

The entire article can be read here

Stefan Auer is associate professor of European studies at the University of Hong Kong. Nicole Scicluna is an assistant professor in government and international studies at Hong Kong Baptist University.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Top