(National) Constitutional Law Limitations on the Advancement of the EU’s Common Commercial Policy

Abstract

The relationship between the Common Commercial Policy (CCP) of the European Union (Art. 207 et seqq. TFEU) and German—or any national—constitutional law has rarely been addressed in the past. This could be the result of a perception that where the more ‘technical’ trade law and ‘political’ constitutional law were considered in tandem, what resulted was a collision of two worlds which prima facie shared little in common. Considered differently, the relationship between national and European constitutional law is also at play here, in so far as one can consider primary EU law as a form of constitutional law. Despite that the division of competences in the ‘European constitutional courts compound’ (Verfassungsgerichtsverbund) has not been definitively established, this relationship has been explored to the greatest extent in multiple judgments of the German Federal Constitutional Court (FCC), the Bundesverfassungsgericht, and the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ). Moreover the national constitutional aspects of the CCP did not normally feature significantly in the foundational judgments of the ECJ and the FCC. In this respect the Maastricht Judgment of the FFC had no impact on the CCP.