The rejection by the Member States’ constitutional orders of the supremacy of the EU law presents the winding process of the European integration. This is an overly neglected topic in the existing studies in Chinese academia on the public law framework embedded in the European integration. The Lisbon Ruling decided by the German Constitutional Court in 2009 entrenched the doctrine of constitutional identity and has been followed by the constitutional courts of the other Member States. By defending the national constitutional orders, the constitutional adjudication in the Member States managed to review the EU law and substantively limited the supremacy of the EU law. From the perspective of constitutional realism, the constitutional identity doctrine could be taken as a leading case to illustrate the tensions between the EU law and its judicial authority on one side and the national constitutional orders and constitutional adjudication of the Member States on the other side. Such a strained structure then points to the inquiries about the nature of the Community that was brought up by the reality of the EU integration.

Chinese Journal of European Studies Vol.39 No.3  June 2021