Bengoetxea, Joxerramon --- "The EU as (More Than) an International Organization" [2011] ELECD 533; in Klabbers, Jan; Wallendahl, Åsa (eds), "Research Handbook on the Law of International Organizations" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2011)

Book Title: Research Handbook on the Law of International Organizations

Editor(s): Klabbers, Jan; Wallendahl, Åsa

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781847201355

Section: Chapter 17

Section Title: The EU as (More Than) an International Organization

Author(s): Bengoetxea, Joxerramon

Number of pages: 18

Extract:

17 The EU as (more than) an international
organization
Joxerramon Bengoetxea*



INTRODUCTION
No two organizations are alike: they are all sui generis. But some international
organizations (IOs) are more sui generis than others. The European Union
(EU), formerly including the European Community (EC), is clearly one of
them. `On the one hand, it may be viewed as an entity created by international
treaties entered into by sovereign states, an entity with its own courts and legal
system, but one founded on the Treaties, which constitute its supreme law. On
the other hand, one can see it as an embryonic federation, inherently commit-
ted to a process of growth by which it will become an actual federation'
(Hartley, 1996: 109). This ambivalent but in my view still correct categoriza-
tion is not so different from Joseph Weiler's constitutional thesis which avoids
the F word of federalism: `the constitutional thesis claims that in critical
aspects the Community has evolved and behaves as if its founding instrument
were not a treaty governed by international law but, to use the language of the
European Court of Justice, a constitutional charter governed by a form of
constitutional law' (Weiler, 1997: 96). The question will then become which
are those crucial aspects Weiler talks about and are there not equally crucial
aspects in which the former EC and especially the EU are international orga-
nizations governed by an international treaty?
If one takes encyclopedias as embracing basic standard knowledge on a
subject, then we can ...