Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in subsequent chapters of this book. The book analyses that country's jurisprudential landmarks on European integration, including the Constitutional Court's assessment of the Maastricht and Lisbon Treaties and the euro rescue measures. It considers the fallout from the Constitutional Treaty (CT's) failure, including the subsequent ratification of the Lisbon Treaty, the first European Union (EU) treaty that did not appreciably advance supranational integration, despite including, verbatim, most of the text of the CT. In particular, this chapter presents how the integration process overburdened law in an attempt to overcome political deficiencies, with consequences for the EU's democratic deficit. It focuses squarely on the euro crisis - the second of the twin crises of EU constitutionalism and the test of the post-Lisbon institutional structure. The chapter explicates the key themes, including the uses and limits of law as an integrationist tool, the impact of integration on traditionally nation-state-centric concepts such as sovereignty and representative democracy.