Abstract:
The idea of constitutional identity has been central to the negotiation of authority between EU and national constitutional orders. Many national constitutional courts have declared that the reach of EU law is limited by certain core elements of the national constitution, often labelled 'constitutional identity'. With the rise of illiberal democracies within the EU, the idea of constitutional identity has increasingly come under criticism, being seen as easily embedded in authoritarian, nativist rhetoric and vulnerable to being abused in bad faith. In The Abuse of Constitutional Identity in the European Union, Julian Scholtes provides novel insights into how European authoritarians have utilised the concept of constitutional identity to further their illiberal goals. Employing a comparative theoretical perspective, his book identifies the factors behind legitimate constitutional identity claims and critically analyses the ways in which these claims can be abused. Scholtes examines abuses of constitutional identity in three distinct theoretical dimensions: generative, substantive, and relational. The generative dimension looks at how constitutional identity claims come about, while the substantive dimension looks at a claim's broader relation to a normative theory of constitutionalism. The relational dimension, on the other hand, considers how constitutional identity claims are advanced and whether they are employed as a means of constitutional dialogue or constitutional disengagement.
The book is based on Julian Scholtes' PhD thesis, written at the EUI. Julian's thesis received the Mauro Cappelletti Prize for the Best Doctoral Thesis in Comparative and European Law in 2023.
About the speaker:
Julian Scholtes joined the University of Glasgow Law School as a Lecturer in Public Law in Fall 2022. Before that, he was a Lecturer in EU and Public Law at Newcastle University (2021-2022) and a PhD Researcher at the EUI (2017-2022). He obtained an LLM in Human Rights Law from the University of Edinburgh (2016) and completed his undergraduate studies in Maastricht (NL) and Ankara (Turkey).