Zur Aktualität des entmaterialisierten Monismus bei Hans Kelsen. Dargestellt am Beispiel der Entwicklung des Europäischen Verwaltungsverbundes

Hans Kelsen's monistic view on international law is widely understood as a theory which speaks for a unitary legal system and even for a »world state.« This is usually followed by the assumption that the Kelsenian monistic theory corresponds with the European integration and moreover with the development of the European administrative network, which has been promoted especially by the advocates for a fundamental reform of German administrative law since the last decade. This article argues that, while both the Kelsenian monism and the reformers' perspective on the European administrative network seem to share the idea of a unitary legal community, they are developed under totally different theoretical and methodological presuppositions. While the former believes Objectivism and Relativism to be the foundations for a peaceful international legal order and therefore insists that a leeway in the concretization of international legal norms must be left to the national organs, especially the national legislature, the latter emphasizes the importance of administrative cooperation at European level and in this sense advocates for a new hierarchy of norms with the primacy of European law, which, according to the reformers, inevitably results in the functional relativization of the national legislature. Viewed this way, the reformers' interpretation of the European administrative network can neither be understood as a fundamental challenge to the traditional idea of sovereignty or to the dualistic theory nor be recognized as a modern realization of Kelsen's theory of international law. Rather, the critical analysis of this article shows that the Kelsenian monistic theory has not gained enough attention in modern discussions in the sense that its highly dematerialized and decentralized approach has long been overlooked, which is though key to a coherent understanding of Kelsen's monism.