ABSTRACT

Looking at it from a historical perspective, EU governance in the internal security domain still appears as a rather unlikely occurrence: the three ‘Community’ founding treaties of the 1950s did not define an internal security objective or competences, and even in the writings of the ‘founding fathers’ – such as Monnet’s ‘Mémoires’ (1975) – one looks in vain for any sort of political blueprint for today’s ‘area of freedom, security and justice’ (AFSJ). It is also one of the most significant results of the European integration process because ever since the emergence of the modern nation-state in the seventeenth/eighteenth century and its conceptualization in the writings of Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, and Rousseau, the provision of security to citizens has been considered part of the basic justification, legitimacy, and exclusive functions of the state. This continues to be reflected in specific constitutional provisions of the EU Member States providing for the supreme responsibilities of the state in matters of internal security – such as Article 5 of the Constitution of the Republic of Poland or Article 117 of the Constitution of the Italian Republic – and wellestablished constitutional doctrines about the intrinsic link between internal security and national sovereignty – such as the systematic upholding of the principle of the ‘essential conditions of the exercise of national sovereignty’ with regard to EU action in the internal

ij 11, Brugge, Belgium