Koutrakos, Panos --- "The role of law in Common Security and Defence Policy: functions, limitations and perceptions" [2011] ELECD 227; in Koutrakos, Panos (ed), "European Foreign Policy" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2011)

Book Title: European Foreign Policy

Editor(s): Koutrakos, Panos

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781849804097

Section: Chapter 8

Section Title: The role of law in Common Security and Defence Policy: functions, limitations and perceptions

Author(s): Koutrakos, Panos

Number of pages: 24

Extract:

8. The role of law in Common Security
and Defence Policy: functions,
limitations and perceptions
Panos Koutrakos

INTRODUCTION
In an essay originally written in the early 1990s, Weiler wrote that, `[i]n some
ways, Community law and the European Court were everything an interna-
tional lawyer could dream about: the Court was creating a new order of inter-
national law in which norms were norms, sanctions were sanctions, courts
were central and frequently used, and lawyers were important'.1
This emphasis on law as a motor for integration has been apparent in the
extraordinary process of group therapy which the European Union has under-
gone in the last nine years: the Laeken Declaration of the European Council in
December 2001, the establishment of the European Convention, the process of
the drafting of the Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe, the fateful
story of its ratification, the Intergovernmental Conference which led to the
signing of the Lisbon Treaty in December 2007, the tumultuous process of its
ratification and its entry into force on 1 December 2009, all brought the law to
the very centre of the debate about the Union's direction. And as the process
got longer and the road to the entry into force of the relevant legal arrange-
ments revealed more roadblocks and turns than their drafters had envisaged,
the debate became more heated and its subject-matter wider and more
profound. The fate of the legal rules agreed upon first in the Constitutional
Treaty and then in ...