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The Health of Nations and the Health of Europe
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 October 2017
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It is an honour to be invited to give this year’s Mackenzie Stuart Lecture. Jack Mackenzie Stuart was a distinguished graduate of this University and of ours in Edinburgh. As a member, and subsequently the President, of the Court of Justice of the European Communities he made a great contribution to the cause of European integration through implementing the laws of the Communities, subsequently the ‘European Union’. As well as performing the ordinary tasks of judging and also latterly of presiding over the Court’s business, he was an apparently tireless publicist for that cause throughout Europe, but most particularly at home in the UK. By seeking to make the work of his Court and the law it administered less mystifying to the ordinary citizen and to the lawyerly public, he made it also less threatening.
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- Copyright © Centre for European Legal Studies, Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge 2005
References
1 Allott, P, The Health of Nations: Society and Law beyond the State (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, hereinafter cited as HoN. In this lecture I restate some themes from a review essay about HoN, see MacCormick, N, ‘How to Have a Healthy Constitution?’ (2003) 40 CMLRev 1537 Google Scholar.
2 HoN 14.41–45.
3 See MacCormick, N, Questioning Sovereignty: Law, State and Nation in the European Commonwealth (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999) 131–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 See HoN 6.26–32
5 HoN 9.48 covers the points summarised here.
6 For a vivid account of the Convention and its working, see Norman, P, The Accidental Constitution: the Story of the European Convention (Brussels, EuroComment, 2003)Google Scholar and Lamassoure, A, Histoire Secrète de la Convention Européenne (Paris, Albin Michel, 2004)Google Scholar.
7 For each of the 16 MEPs elected to take part in the Convention, there was an alternate member elected from the same political group in the European Parliament. Having been elected the alternate member from the Greens/European Free Alliance Group, I took an active part in all meetings of the Convention and in two of its working groups. I also consulted extensively in my own constituency (Scotland) and by visiting meetings all over Europe organised by other parties within the European Free Alliance.
8 See Grimm, D, ‘Does Europe Need a Constitution?’ (1995) 1 European Law Journal 282 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and, in opposition thereto, Habermas, J, ‘Comment on the Paper by Dieter Grimm’ (1995) 1 European Law Journal 303 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9 Siedentop, L, Democracy in Europe (London, Allen Lane, 2000)Google Scholar especially at 122–50, opines that without an ‘open political class’, the conditions for effective democratic self-government in Europe cannot be achieved.
10 My banality, not Allott’s.
11 Ferguson, A, An Essay on the History of Civil Society 1767 (ed Forbes, D, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1966)Google Scholar.
12 For an example, I would respectfully cite Smith’s, J Justification and Excuse in the Criminal Law (London, Stevens, 1989) 77–8Google Scholar, discussing what society wants in the way of admitting a defence of necessity to a charge of murder.
13 HoN 10.3(1).
14 MacCormick, N, ‘On the Very Idea of a European Constitution: Jurisprudential Reflections from the European Parliament’ (2001) 2 Juridisk Tidskrift 529 Google Scholar.
15 See Booker, C and North, R, The Great Deception: the Secret History of the European Union (London, Continuum, 2003)Google Scholar.
16 Very few of the rights in the Charter, e.g. those concerning voting in local elections and all-Union elections, are reserved to Union citizens.
17 Indeed, Art IV–445 does establish a procedure whereby the bits of Part III that regulate the single market can be amended by a simplified procedure whenever the effect is to diminish competences exercised by the Union. This will call for a unanimous vote in the European Council followed by approval by the European Parliament and confirmation by each Member State according to its own constitutional requirements.
18 See Arts I–46 and I–50.
19 See Art I–9(1) and (2).
20 See Art 1–9(3) and (4).
21 Scottish National Party MEP for Scotland, 1999–2004; alternate member of the European Convention (Greens/European Free Alliance) 2002–3.
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