On July 16, 2010, when the debt crisis that currently engulfs Europe was still beginning to take shape, I discussed the Implications of European De-Integration for International Law, in a short post on this blog. In the post, I predicted that the fiscal crises would have major implications for the future of European integration and that—unlike the original euro project—efforts to deal with the crisis “will not be the result of a popular policy preference, but instead will be the product of an external constraint on the ability of European economies to remain integrated without spiraling into chaos.”
Since the Summer of 2010, events have not taken a positive turn, and hopes of finding an easy resolution to the problem of rapidly increasing public debt in several Eurozone countries have deteriorated. It is now clear that the Eurozone as initially constituted is a failure, and will need to be revamped and remade in a new, and largely unrecognizable, form. Whether the future of the euro and Eurozone lies in radical integration or in disintegration at this point remains uncertain.
Some of the basic ideas in the original blog post have been fleshed out in an article that I published in Volume 17 of the Columbia Journal of European Law, entitled Implications of European Disintegration for International Law. The Article explains the structural problems with the euro system which make the current crisis so intractable, and also offers some lessons for international law more generally. From the abstract:
The European debt crisis that started in 2009 has revealed underlying structural problems in the European Monetary Union, threatening the viability of the common currency in its current form. An unraveling of monetary coordination in Europe would mark a significant event of disintegration, in the face of a decades-long trend of integration that was commonly considered an inevitable and self-sustaining process.
This Article argues that even a reasonable possibility of disintegration of this magnitude upsets previous theorizing about European integration which over-emphasized the EU’s “supranational” character.
More generally, disintegration poses serious problems for international law scholarship across the ideological spectrum, much of which has organized itself around the historically contingent trend of integration as if it were an a-historical given. The debt crises reveals that use of Europe by both “Skeptical” and “Cosmopolitan” international law scholars is largely an opportunistic rhetorical strategy that conceals fundamental weaknesses of both viewpoints in their debate over the limits and promise of international legalization and cooperation.
Posted by matthewcturk 
Prisoners’ voting rights: a success story for the enforceability of the ECHR?
November 9, 2010By Emily MacKenzie, NYU School of Law, (LL.M Candidate, 2011)
The last week has seen a tense discourse in political and legal circles in the UK centering on prisoners’ voting rights. This discussion in some sense represents the culmination of five years of debate about the enforceability of judgments made by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). In March 2004 the ECtHR held unanimously in Hirst v UK that the UK’s blanket ban on prisoners voting violated Article 3 Protocol 1 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Despite the rejection of the UK’s appeal to the Grand Chamber, and the obligation under Article 46 ECHR to enforce Strasbourg judgments, the government has to date failed to enact legal reform to implement this decision. Whilst there has been an ongoing consultation, it is not overly cynical to describe the process as merely ‘going through the motions.’ The unexplained delays, refusal to entertain the option of allowing all prisoners to vote, and the government’s consistent expression of its disagreement with the ruling all attest to this conclusion.
Repeated criticisms by the Council of Europe came to a head when the government failed to act on any of the proposals in time to allow prisoners to vote in the June 2010 election. Last week, however, UK newspapers reported that the new coalition government is finally going to implement the judgment. (See coverage by The Guardian here.) The exact program and timescale of reform remain unclear, but it seems to be generally accepted that a change is in the offing. The governmental attitude remains, however, that such reform is something imposed on the UK by Europe, that it is not something that the government wants, and that they will apply it as restrictively as possible. In light of this continued reticence, one may ask: why after five years of stalling is the government finally giving in? Read the rest of this entry »