‘The master pulls a fence around his house’?

The Significance of the PSPP Decision of the German Federal Constitutional Court and the Reality of Constitutional Responsibility for European Integration

Abstract

The relationship between national constitutional courts and the CJEU, and the absolute primacy of EU law over the constitutions of the Member States, has been and continues to be sustained by all bodies interpreting the constitutions through the so-called European constitutional dialogue, while the need to define these relations invoked the necessity of protecting constitutional identity. In the scientific discourse of recent years, we can come across moments of ‘bread breaking’ with increasing frequency, when, due to the uncertainty of the relationship between these organs, they and the sources of law they protect collide. On May 5, 2020, with the German Federal Constitutional Court’s PSPP-decision, said moment seems to have arrived, although perhaps the resulting processes will be less intense than we might first think. In its introduction, the paper shortly touches upon standing questions of the competences between national constitutional courts and the CJEU, then, starting out from the constitutional core of the decision – that is, the constitutional responsibility for the integration (Integrationsverantwortung) – the main part presents the practical and theoretical importance of this German decision, as well as its expected effects and its afterlife regarding national bodies in charge of constitutional adjudication and the CJEU, with an eye on relevant CJEU jurisprudence as well.