Between Differentiation and Federalization: Which Model for the EU?

Differentiation has been the answer to the complexity of the process of integration which has taken place in Europe since the 1957 Rome (founding) Treaties. It has been prized as a virtue of the process of integration which could proceed only accommodating the different national preferences and views on that process’s finality. It has institutionalized ambiguity as the necessary form of inter-state relations within the EU. Undoubtedly, it has worked effectively in aggregating a growing number of European states within the same legal framework. The multiple crises of the 2010s have however called into question the strategy of differentiation, since they raised a sovereignty’s cleavage that is not easily tamed by further differentiating the structure and the functioning of the EU. The paper investigates the alternative strategy of federalization for dealing with the sovereignty’s cleavage. Particularly, it elaborates the features of a federal union’s model aimed to compound member state sovereignty on domestically relevant policies (self-rule) and Union sovereignty on policies of common interest (shared rule). The Conference on the future of Europe might offer the opportunity for identifying a sovereign union of sovereign states.