Decisions of the European Court of Justice on the primacy of Community law and sovereign decisions of national constitutional courts in the light of the progress of the European integration process

The primacy of Community law is based on the idea that if there is a conflict between an aspect of EU law and the law of an EU Member State, EU law will prevail over the national law of the Member State, and will be the specific body of law that constitutes the legal system of the EU Member States, providing guidance and guidance. The main justification – and necessity – for this principle is generally presented by the argument that if Member States were simply allowed to allow their own national laws to take precedence over primary or secondary EU law, this would, over time, stretch the legal and operational framework of the European Union as an economic and political community.

At the same time, as the legal scholar and politician László Trócsányi[1] points out in an interpretative essay, European integration itself owes its existence to the constitutions of the Member States, which means that the Treaties are always adopted or amended by the will of the Member States. Consequently, as far as the relationship between national law and Community law is concerned, this relationship does not offer a clear-cut situation, and the majority of Member States – including Hungary – have no intention of subordinating their national constitutions to Community law. Respect for the national identities of the Member States, on the one hand, and for common constitutional traditions, on the other, is an essential element of cooperation between Member States at European level.

To understand the issue, it is also important to know the main trends in the history of European integration. The European Union and its predecessors have increasingly shifted institutions away from intergovernmentalism towards supranationalism, and the Community has become increasingly political as well as economic. The recent case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union is now strongly supranational in character, ignoring the fact that national constitutions have set the framework within which each European institution operates. At the same time, we are now seeing that European citizens have little or no control – and only indirect control – over the internal workings of an increasingly political integration.

At the same time, today’s critique of the primacy of Community law as a fundamental principle in the perception of the legal community and in the practice of national constitutional courts indicates that constitutional self-identity has been lost in recent decades, and the idea of sovereignty has increasingly challenged the approach of politicians and lawyers in favour of a more federal – and more political – European integration, and this professional – and often public and topical political – debate has become increasingly open and, at the same time, increasingly important.