Constitutional conflict and contestation

Matej Avbelj

Chapter 17 in Research Handbook on European Constitutional Law, 2026, pp 303-319 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Against the backdrop of the growing reluctance of national constitutional courts to comply with CJEU rulings — provoking crises within the very constitutional set-up of European integration — this chapter seeks to understand what precisely has remained disputed and unresolved in the EU's constitutional structure, and why. The answer, it emerges, depends on the theoretical perspective adopted on the legal nature of European integration. Three such perspectives dominate: the national statist, the supranational, and the constitutionally pluralist approaches. Upon their analysis, the chapter shows that constitutional pluralism offers notable theoretical and practical advantages over the alternatives. In particular, the pluralist approach calls for a different understanding of constitutional tensions in the EU and, consequently, supports a new typology of constitutional dissonances. This typology makes it possible to distinguish between justified dissonance and constitutional conflicts that amount to violations of EU law or even systemic defiance.

Keywords: Constitutional dissonance; Constitutional conflicts; Statism; Supranationalism; Constitutional pluralism; EU law (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
ISBN: 9781802207866
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