This is how Europe is falling apart

Three days in July shake Europe to its foundations. A conflict that has been brewing for years – which has priority: national constitutional law or EU law? – explodes. It has the potential to set Europe back decades in its ambition to become a heavyweight on par with the USA and China.

Since Tuesday, Poland’s constitutional tribunal has been examining whether the national constitution allows the EU to take precedence over its law. And from today, Wednesday, whether the European Court of Justice (ECJ) can demand changes to the judicial reform of Poland. A judgment against the EU is expected in both cases.

The ECJ will strike back on Thursday. It decides whether Poland’s disciplinary chambers for unpleasant judges are compatible with the rule of law in the European Treaties. In previous judgments he had doubts about this and demanded that Poland should take them into account.

And then? In the western part of the EU, the pent-up anger against Poland – and Hungary – is likely to break out. Can’t you throw them out? It wasn’t the point of eastward expansion that it would ruin our community of values!

In the east, on the other hand, many citizens will find satisfaction. It is high time that someone showed the transgressive moralists in Brussels where the limits of control lie – and insist on compliance with the contractual distribution of competences, which is a matter for the member states and what is a matter for the EU.

Secretly, some citizens in the West should also be happy. Heart and mind often diverge. Many who consider Europe to be a good thing and know that the future lies in European integration, feel at the same time that their own identity is more oriented towards their own state than the EU institutions. Citizens who find themselves in an emergency abroad should contact the national embassy, ​​not the EU representation.

If you want to advance Europe and avoid setbacks, you have to take the citizens with you. Was it wise of the EU to take the legal conflict to extremes? It achieves the opposite: it divides Europe.

The Commission and Parliament cannot even hope to have a clear majority of Europeans behind them just because Poland is the adversary – and recently Hungary in the dispute over the homosexual law.

Karlsruhe also criticizes “Ultra vires”: exceeding competence

The criticism that the EU is exceeding its competences is also exercised by the Federal Constitutional Court in its “ultra vires” judgment. His ex-President Andreas Vosskuhle and many other European law experts deny that EU law has automatic priority.

The nation states are the source of the EU’s political and legal legitimacy. What the EU is allowed to do is based on what the member states have assigned to it in the European treaties. The organization of the judiciary is not one of them, nor is it the definition of what is taught in sex education and what a say parents have in it.

If the EU argues that it does not have direct substantive competence, but can derive its interference from the fact that it has to enforce European values ​​such as democracy, the rule of law and equal treatment, it is walking on thin ice. This review is also initially the responsibility of national judges.

Europe’s judges cannot give priority to themselves

Both legally and politically, neither side can win this dispute. The EU and the ECJ are themselves parties to the dispute, so they are biased. How credible would that be if the ECJ certifies that it has priority over national courts and that this is the last word? Similarly absurd was the decision of the EU Commission to drag the Federal Government into infringement proceedings because the Federal Constitutional Court, which is independent of it, has a European component that displeases Brussels.

As in a civil partnership, the following applies to the EU: caution and foresight are required before you take a dispute to extremes and say the ultimate last words that you can no longer take back. They can destroy the relationship on which the future rests.