Joint Exercise of Sovereign Powers of the Member States of the European Union. The French Approach to Legal Understanding of the European Union

Introduction. This article analyses the legal nature of the European Union (hereinafter referred to as the Union). The research presented in this article is based on two closely related theses. On the one hand, the Union is a legally qualifying entity, and on the other hand,the Unionists for a long time exercising legal (judicial) activism because they have been trying to form their own entity. Theoretical Basis. Methods. The object of the study is the legal identification of the Union and the semantic and conceptual category of ‘joint exercise of powers’. Taking into account the data from the analysis of doctrinal sources, Union law, applying the methodological tools of functionalism as a sociological and anthropological theory, which offers an explanation of the functioning of society based on elements that ensure stability, the author concludes that the stability manifest¬ed in the independence of the Union leads to the opposite effect – a break with the democratic foundations of states that united in the Union, yielding part of their sovereignty. Results. The author of the article concludes that the peculiarity of the Union lies in the particular way in which it exercises the state powers delegated to it. What distinguishes it from other categories of international governmental organisations is not so much the accumulation of powers, their scope and multipolarity, but rather how they are exercised. In this context, Member States are faced not so much with the deprivation of national powers as with a new manifestation of shared sovereignty embodied in the concept of shared exercise of powers. Discussion and Conclusion. From a legal point of view, the Union is a unique, distinctive legal and political entity. The Member States rejected the federal (state-legal) form of the Union. It cannot be reduced to an international intergovernmental organisation, although it borrows much from this legal category. The Union has many specific features in economic, political and legal terms that characterise it as a special subject of public international law. The concept of the Union reflects the legal traditions of the Member States. The author summarises in the article that French legal doctrine has been able to offer a theoretical vision of the Union in terms of the particularities of its political-legal culture. The author therefore believes that the joint exercise of powers is a tool that reveals the essence of the Union. This makes it difficult for France, which has a very developed concept of national sovereignty, to legal understanding of nature of the Union.