La sovranità tra Costituzioni nazionali e Trattati europei

Abstract

Abstract: Sovereignty between national Constitutions and European Treaties. – Most of EU Member State Constitutions refer to European integration in terms of limitations of sovereignty or transfer of sovereign powers. While European Treaties tend to avoid any explicit reference to sovereignty, they nevertheless acknowledge the permanent nature of this transfer process, requiring that specific decisions – as “passerelle clauses” – cannot be adopted without previous involvement of national Parliaments, or that simplified Treaty amendments shall enter into force after being ratified by all the MS «in accordance with their respective constitutional requirements». National systems can be cooperative to this phenomenon of permanent “silent” transfer of sovereign powers, but they can also be reluctant, as in the case of Germany after the Lisbon judgment of the BVerG. The Italian case is interesting, as its political system, after an aborted attempt at the end of the nineties, never succeeded in introducing a proper “European clause” in its Constitution. While parliamentary debates show
the readiness of Italian mainstream politics to allow every further integration in the EU by ordinary acts of legislation, constitutional scholars after Brexit started debating on the impossibility to leave EU (or the Eurozone) without previous constitutional revision. Since the fragility of Italian sovereign debt on the global financial markets, more than a long constitutional process of “Italexit”, it is plausible that the rupture of the Eurozone will be caused by the unwillingness of Germany and other “creditor Countries” to accept the next “whatever it takes” to save the euro. It is therefore important to analyze Article 88 of the German constitution, according to which the transfer of monetary sovereignty must be subject to the condition of independent central banking committed to the overriding goal of price stability. As warned in the Gauweiler case of the BVerG, this constitutional clause can legitimate the refusal of the German central Bank and the German executive to cope with the monetary policies of the EU in the future.