Europaverfassungsrecht aus Karlsruhe

In our time, it is – in modification of Carl Schmitt's well-known dictum – the institution that decides on the basic norm that can be considered sovereign. With regard to the European integration the question of »quis iudicabit«, has been subject to controversies for more than 60 years – and recently a sharpend conflict -, which jurisprudence cannot solve even by digging deeper and deeper. Especially, the notion of autonomy remains ambivalent in this respect. It therefore seems more expedient to respect the political reality of a specific inverse architecture of governance (inverse Herrschaftstruktur) within the European Union, which is more elastic than that in a central or federal state and which cannot and somehow does not want to answer the question of primacy unequivocally. Against that background, the ambivalence of supranationalism constructed in a state-analogue manner should be recognised as a common constitutional imperative of the Union and the member states. To some extent this forces law into ambiguity and results in compensatory evasions into other normative or political discourses, which increasingly call for efforts advertising for the acceptance of judicial authority. Considering in this context that the Federal Constitutional Court in its jurisprudence on European integration has always had less of an eye on the state as a dominant or pre-legal institution, but rather on democracy as an order of a self-determination of a political community anchored in equal freedom, with the power of constitutional authority and the self-assertion of its political independence, certain reservations of control are thus by no means the last citadels of a closed nation-statehood that has been blown away. On the contrary, they are necessary in order to maintain the constructive balance that has been a characteristic of a Europe growing together from the very beginning, so that the European Union can assert itself functionally and normatively in its liberal signature as a strong association of well-functioning states.