NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY IN THE EUROPEAN UNION?

State sovereignty is the legal notion that expresses the ability of a state to not be bound or determined by anything but its own will, in the limitations of superior principle of law and according to a common goal that the state is called to accomplish. This ability has to facets: one interior to state called autonomy and one external named independence. Any sovereign state enjoys a lot of rights that in the conditions of the European Union are transferred by member states to the Union and therefore their sovereignty has different connotations. Furthermore, the EU was conceived in its primary form by scholars educated in the nation state environment and that of state positive law and, however visionary they might have been at that time, they could not have foreseen the economic and social growth of Europe. The attributes of sovereignty that gradually have been dropped or transferred can no longer be restored to member states for the process is legally irreversible. The rules adopted internally by member states have to be compatible with the principles and rules of the European Union, community law being priority to national law. National case-law has admitted the priority of a European community law principle over the national law and this represents a drastic limitation of state sovereignty (concerning internal autonomy), as well as accepting the superiority of unwritten European legal norms over the written national legal norms. The transfer by states from their legal system towards the European legal system of certain rights and obligations that results according to the EC Treaty carries with it a permanent limitation of their sovereign rights.