ABSTRACT
The Intergovernmental Conferences that have assessed and developed the Treaty of Maastricht have had to deal with matters of content, but also with the form of the legal basis on which the European Union rests. To date this basis has consisted of a number of international treaties among sovereign states. Yet the object of these treaties is precisely the transfer of sovereign rights to the supranational Community that was created by the states. So far this has not resulted in a new superstate in which the contracting parties exist only as constituent sub-states. Conversely, the EU does not resemble traditional international institutions, in which Member States agree to restrictions on the exercise of their sovereign rights without ceding them. Because the European Union-or, to be more precise, the European Community as its central pillar-possesses sovereign rights which are exercised with direct effect in the Member States, it breaches the dated dualism of states and international organizations and transforms itself into an intermediary polity that is both unprecedented and that lacks-even now-an adequate terminology.
