Development of the treaty making-power of the European Communities and the European Union from the Treaties of Rome to the present day
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Abstract
Although the previous European Communities were established at about the same time, their founding treaties did not have the same provisions on the treaty making power. While the two Treaties of Rome generally mandated the European Atomic Energy Community to conclude international agreements with third parties, the European Economic Community was able to conclude them only in a few strictly specified cases. The Maastricht Treaty, as the founding treaty of the European Union, did not grant this type of authority to the new organization. As the first pillar in the new EU structure, only the European Communities retained the powers to conclude international agreements with other subjects of international law. It was only after the adoption of the Treaty of Amsterdam and the Treaty of Nice that the EU was explicitly authorized to conclude international agreements, but only in the area of common foreign and security policy, and police and judicial co-operation in criminal matters. The Lisbon Treaty has brought significant changes in terms of regulating EU powers in the area of international treaties. First of all, it abolished the three-pillar structure and instituted the European Union as the sole legal entity that has the treaty-making power. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the rules on the treaty-making power were codified in a single document, which also legalized the existing case law. In drafting this founding treaty, the framers decided to treat the issue of legal grounds and the scope of the EU treaty-making power separately from the issue of the classification of EU powers according to the criterion of their legal nature.
Considering the legal ground, a clear distinction has been made between direct or primary powers to conclude agreements explicitly regulated by the founding treaties, on the one hand, and the indirect or secondary powers arising from the legal facts envisaged in the founding treaties, on the other. As for the legal nature, provisions explicitly envisage only the exclusive powers of the EU to conclude agreements, without specifying the shared or so-called “soft” powers of the Union to coordinate, support and complement the activities of the Member States in contracting international agreements, but the latter can still be inferred by interpreting various parts of the founding treaties.
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