National and Constitutional Identities in the European Union
This project aims to explore the notions of national and constitutional identities in the context of the ongoing crises at the European and global level, such as the rule of law crisis, the migration crisis, the Covid-19 crisis, or the very recent ‘declaration of war’ by the Bundesverfassungsgericht to the CJEU in the PSPP ruling. Arguably, national identity and constitutional identity are two distinct but interrelated concepts, and next to the identities of EU countries, there is also an overarching concept of a European identity (or EU identity) which deserves scholarly attention. National identity is embedded in Article 4(2) of the Treaty on European Union, which makes it an autonomous notion of EU law, while national constitutional courts invoke constitutional identity as a potential threat to the primacy of EU law. This project therefore aims to examine this tension and to explore the notion of the EU’s constitutional core as well as the limits of constitutional tolerance. One of the big questions of our era is whether the EU has merely an obligation to respect the identities of its Member States, or also an obligation to protect them against unwelcome political and legal developments, which we are currently witnessing.
