This project posits that one important way of the EU’s reconfiguration is the conflict between national and EU courts. According to a well-established narrative, the Court of Justice empowered national courts by making judicial review central to the enforcement of EU law. From the competence and control perspective, the Court of Justice (as the governor) granted to national courts (as intermediaries) the competence to enforce EU law, controlled through the preliminary reference procedure. National courts are perfect intermediaries based on their expertise, legitimacy, and operational capacity. Nonetheless, this setup carried great risks. Member States are characterised by great diversity, and while some national courts took up the role of the intermediary, others contested that setup and sought to regain control.  

These dynamics loom large in criminal law. An area with a high path-dependency, it is characterised by diverse traditions of procedural and substantive criminal law. In a borderless market, however, the EU extended the logic of mutual recognition to states’ acts of coercion, which raised new issues for fundamental rights protection. Faced with such immense changes, ordinary national courts are extensively submitting preliminary references in this area, with courts from Member States who joined the EU in 2004 onwards being particularly active.9 While the literature deals extensively with EU criminal law, it remains highly specialised and does not focus on the effects of criminal law regulation on the nature of the polity as such. Likewise, diverse national criminal law systems have not been methodically studied. Criminal law is thus a particularly salient area for studying under-researched judicial power dynamics: it is of great relevance to the EU as a whole but deeply embedded in national constitutional traditions.  

In short, this project asks: In criminal law, how do ordinary national courts contest and transform supranational judicial control in the EU? Its academic contribution is to map competence-control trade-offs in judicial contestation by the diverse and under-researched world of ordinary national courts. First, the project will seek to show that competence-control trade-offs in the judicial realm materialise through claims of control by the Court of Justice (to say what EU law is), and the contestation, by national courts, of their competence of enforcement. Second, the project will demonstrate the empirical variety of those conflicts in criminal law; the effect that the constitutional and criminal law backgrounds of national courts have on the response of the Court of Justice; and the resulting trade-offs between competence and control. The reconfiguration of vertical power-sharing shaped by constitutional variety of national courts has not been studied before. It is expected that courts with different backgrounds will exhibit diverse claims to control and accordingly produce varied outcomes at the EU level. 

The goals of the project are to provide a theoretical account and a comprehensive empirical analysis of the mobilization of financial resources by the EU and the controls attached to them and an analysis of the significance of these competence-control tradeoffs effects for EU polity formation. 

The project aims to provide a theoretical account of the structure of EU finances (the regular budget and extra-budgetary funds) in terms of financial resources and their control and the factors driving this structure and its changes over time. More specifically, it asks which competence-control tradeoffs shape the finances of the EU, what causes these tradeoffs and how they evolve. By analyzing finances, the project will look at a dimension of polity-building that state-oriented theories have found to be of high importance and conceptualize the link between the integration of financial resources, their control and the development of the EU. The explanation of the evolution and outcome of competence-control tradeoffs will be based on the interaction between the demand and supply of competence and control from specific actors. 

Empirically, the project aims to provide a systematic description of the EU’s finances and their controls since the 1950s. The goal is to be as comprehensive as possible and cover all financial resources available to the EU, permanent or time-limited, within the regular budget or outside of it and the statutory, constitutional, judicial, and political controls attached to them. The comprehensive empirical approach makes it possible to look at the differences in the competence-control tradeoffs in the various schemes in the governance of the EU’s finances across topics and over time. The project will create a dataset on the finances of the EU which includes financial data and their controls on a yearly basis. It will also perform a quantitative text analysis on the demand for EU fiscal competence and its controls. Comparative case studies will probe into causal mechanisms of EU competence-control tradeoffs at critical junctures. 

The core interest of this project is to analyse why, how, and to which effect the EU relies on “joint implementation”, i.e., the physical involvement of supranational alongside national resources in the monitoring and enforcement of EU policies on the ground. 

The “polycrisis” has repeatedly highlighted the implementation deficits in the EU multilevel system. In reaction, the EU has increasingly relied on the “joint implementation” model. A notable example is the creation of the European Border and Coast Guard (Frontex) and the European Union Asylum Agency (EUAA) to support the practical implementation of the Schengen and Dublin acquis in the member states. Other examples concern the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) or the European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO). 

Joint implementation formulates a novel response to the dilemma between competence and control in multilevel systems. At the same time, joint implementation is not a panacea. When dissatisfied principals seek to enhance their autonomous competence or control while being enmeshed in a compulsory system of joint implementation, the model produces inefficiencies. While control-driven actors can block joint implementation, which leads to ineffective or non-implementation, competence-driven actors can shirk their collective responsibilities and engage in uncoordinated action, leading to responsibility-shifting or obstruction. 

To understand the emergence, institutionalisation, and evolution of the EU’s recourse to joint implementation, the project envisions a mixed methods design. It combines, first, the collection of supply-side quantitative data on the emergence and size of EU-level resources for joint implementation with, second, natural language processing (NLP) methods to trace the demand for EU-level implementation among political elites, and third, qualitative case studies of multilevel implementation in three domains in which pressures for vertical cooperation occurred in the past years, namely immigration, law enforcement, and labour mobility. 

The project examines the role of courts in the EU. It focuses on the often neglected impact of cross-level judicial control on the horizontal separation of powers, i.e. the balance of competences between the legislative, executive and judicial branches. While one of the core tasks of the judiciary is to keep checks and balances within a constitutional system, the particularity of the development to be explored lies in the cross-level interplay between competence and control: national courts claim stronger control over the exercise of competence at the European level in order to contain a feared loss of competence at the national level, but also to re-balance the horizontal distribution of power at EU level. If a national court, such as the German Federal Constitutional Court, claims to review whether an EU institution has exceeded its competences, it may at the same time demand a re-balancing of competences between the EU institutions, for example, the reduction of the independence of the European Central Bank. Conversely, the ECJ increasingly monitors the exercise of competences at the national level and sometimes directly addresses the structure of national institutions. If the ECJ enforces the judicial independence of national courts as a response to national rule-of-law crises, it essentially demands a re-balancing of competences at the national level.

The project has three main thrusts. First, it aims to produce the first comprehensive study of comparative constitutional law on how national constitutional and supreme courts exert a controlling influence on the horizontal power-sharing at EU level. Secondly, it will produce the first in-depth legal study of whether and to what extent the ECJ may influence the domestic structure of powers, including the legislative and executive branches. Thirdly, the project will examine from an overall perspective whether there are regulative principles that apply to cross-level and value-based judicial control, whereby for the first time the principle of equality of member states will be the focus of an in-depth study.

Apart from facilitating the work of the group as a whole by organising meetings, interactions and external communication, the coordination project has two substantive tasks.
The first is to support the work on a competence-control theory of European integration. Work on theory-building will happen in close collaboration with the substantive projects in order to account for empirical trends and variance. For instance, if the group finds systematic differences in the competence-control tradeoffs between rules and resources, why is this the case? What explains potential differences between the competence-control tradeoffs in policy-making and in implementation? What explains the patterns of competence-control tradeoffs at a given point in time or their evolution over time into a competence-oriented, control-oriented or balanced pattern? 

The second is to coordinate and orchestrate the creation of a dataset on the EU’s resources which draws on the results of the projects by Freudlsperger, Genschel, Hartlapp, Jachtenfuchs and Schimmelfennig. In order to create a theoretically meaningful, empirically interesting and truly common dataset for the wider scientific community, a substantial and sustained effort for standardizing data collection is necessary. The project will also work on a common theoretical understanding of the type of resources included into the dataset.