Abstract (eng)
In light of Brexit and the America First policy of the current US Administration, it is sometimes contended that the EU concept of ‘ever closer union’ is doomed to failure. The instant work uses an interdisciplinary and comparative legal approach to examine this contention through a biopsychosocial constructivist lens. Placing the phenomenon of EU integration into its psycho-social, cultural and mythological context, this thesis asserts that such statements are based on an exogenic-endogenic antinomic perceptive disjunction concerning the existential significance of the EU. From the outside perspective of the Brexiteer and the Americans, the EU is fundamentally a trade block that threatens the sovereignty and hampers the realization of the potential of its Member States. Whereas, in line with the internal EU perspective, the Union is a project of regional integration which is absolutely essential in order to prevent the cultural and territorial disintegration of each and every Member State. The Union, that is, protects both sovereignty and culture, and, as such, it is required, so long as it obeys the legal principles of conferral, proportionality and subsidiarity.