ABSTRACT
How the EU impacts, effects, participates and interacts in and with the global legal order presents many challenges for orthodoxy. One of the greatest challenges that it presents as a leading postnational democracy is argued here to be for our understanding of sovereignty. Accounts which depict or describe the EU as a postnational actor do not tend to invoke sovereignty, neither as a construct nor as a method or process thereof. Instead, such accounts are more concerned with the place within breakdowns of orthodoxy conceived broadly, the shortcomings of postnational democracy and its institutional components and rulemaking practices. And there are many accounts in legal scholarship as to how the EU has evolved as an international actor, particularly after its last treaty revision process.1 Such accounts suggest that the EU plays an ‘active role in shaping the international order’2 in terms of its objectives and practices and many policies, but it is similarly not a discourse mediated through sovereignty. The EU’s participation in the global legal order is argued to show manifestations of ‘late sovereignty’, or at least to be atypical of postnational sovereignty.3 It has spatial, action and transboundary dimensions that require unpacking. Sovereignty is arguably neither popular nor conventional, nor does it transpose itself into discourses of rule-making beyond the nation state. For some, to speak of sovereignty in the context of global governance leads to bewildering identification of a ‘global sovereign’. International relations ‘constructivists’ emphasise that sovereignty in its internal and external facets is a socially constructed trait.4 They
1 See Steven Blockmans, Bart van Vooren, and Jan Wouters (eds), The Legal Dimension of Global Governance: What Role for the EU? (Oxford University Press, 2012).
