Europe’s authoritarian shift

The European Union prides itself for being a legal order and a supranational organisation created through, and organised around, a specific institutional framework and an ordoliberal-inspired “rules against discretion” approach. Theories of ‘integration through law’ abound and the European Monetary Union (EMU) remains a unique common currency area structured within a constitutional framework. Officially, the formal priority of treaties, mandates and the European legal framework are presented as the sine qua non of European integration. Law, however, is interpretation. And when the question of interpreting the meaning and scope of this legal order comes into play, so does discretion. Any serious observer of the EU knows full well that the glorification of the legal formalism of the EU exists in parallel with a degree of discretionary interpretation that allows for considerable contestation and ambiguity.