Institutional Balance and Separation of Powers in EU law

Organised by

• Department of Law

The chapter that will be the object of the presentation and discussion argues for applying a normative conception of separation of powers to the present-day institutional setting and practice of the European Union. It is submitted that such a framework could lend itself to more instructive scrutiny than that offered by the principle of institutional balance which is often considered to be an equivalent of separation of powers in the EU legal order.

Krajewski argues that the institutional balance does not help us make sense of the constitutional claim that the functioning of the EU is based on representative democracy (Article 10(1) TEU). Furthermore, the universal nature of the EU’s constitutional objectives, increasing prominence of values in justifying the public authority in the EU and regularly occurring redistributive effects of EU policymaking call for a more comprehensive normative benchmark than that offered by the institutional balance.