Law Commons^™

Introduction, George A. Bermann

Faculty Scholarship

Who would have imagined even fifteen years ago that a notion of "EU citizenship" would come to occupy center-stage in the arena of EU legal developments and widely permeate fields of EU law to which citizenship at the EU level long appeared to have little to say? By contrast, Member State citizenship lay at the heart of things from the start, as rights and obligations alike seemed to turn, at least largely, on whether an interested person bore the citizenship or nationality of a Member State.

Reflections On The Papers Presented By Weiler, Goebel, And Meyers & Levie, George A. Bermann

Faculty Scholarship

The preceding papers amply demonstrate that an important step in the progressive integration of the European Union can be a compelling one without being an easy one. The transition to economic and monetary union (EMU) in Europe is precisely such a step. In this brief comment, I hope merely to show that, however powerful may be the case for economic and monetary union, passage to it is both generating institutional misgivings and entailing what could be institutional mistakes.

I begin with the case for economic and monetary union, which I consider to be a very strong one indeed. Not many …

Regulatory Decisionmaking In The European Commission, George A. Bermann

Faculty Scholarship

As an institution variously described as the "motor" or "engine" of European integration and as the European Union's "executive branch," the Commission of the European Communities finds itself at the center of Community decisionmaking. Yet its decisional processes are still quite poorly understood, at least in the United States. The relatively poor grasp of Commission decisionmaking is certainly not due to any general lack of interest in procedure within the American audience. The problem lies more in the highly restrictive view of decisionmaking that traditionally dominates procedural accounts of the Community institutions. Those accounts have tended to reflect three preoccupations. …

Taking Subsidiarity Seriously: Federalism In The European Community And The United States, George A. Bermann

Faculty Scholarship

For a principle that has dominated discussions of European federalism for over five years, subsidiarity has received surprisingly poor academic mention. Subsidiarity has been criticized as "inelegant . . .Eurospeak," "the epitome of confusion," and simple "gobbledegook." It has been described by some as nothing new and by others as quite novel and actually quite dangerous. The President of the Commission of the European Communities, said to be an enthusiast of subsidiarity, finds it used at times as an "alibi," and more specifically as "a fig leaf ... to conceal [an] unwillingness to honour the commitments which have already been …