John M. Kelly Memorial Lecture
The School of Law’s recently held its annual John M. Kelly Memorial Lecture, with Professor Gráinne de Búrca as the guest speaker. Professor de Búrca is the Florence Ellinwood Allen Professor of Law at New York University Law School. Professor de Búrca is an alumna of the UCD School of Law (BCL) and was previously Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, Fordham Law School, and at the European University Institute in Florence. The talk for the lecture was entitled “Appraising the EU Experiment after 60 Years” where Professor de Búrca examined the development of the European Union over the last sixty years and shared some thoughts about what paths it might take through and beyond the current crisis.
L-R: Mr. Nick Kelly, Professor Gráinne de Búrca, Professor Colin Scott, Dean of Law
She began by asking: what is the European Union for? What is its raison d'etre? She pointed out that this had been clear 60 years ago when the foundations for the EU were first laid, and when the goals of peace, prosperity and supranationality were widely shared and clearly understood. Over time, however, the EU had delivered significantly on these three goals, and its achievements in this respect were largely taken for granted. Despite its achievements, the EU had persistently failed to earn the kind of unquestioned legitimacy that nation states in Europe enjoy. The EU was still expected to justify itself in terms of the outputs it can deliver for ordinary people, and was not taken for granted or accepted as a legitimate polity but is constantly judged on its performance and outputs. The current economic crisis was exacerbating this problem, since the EU was now seen to be hindering prosperity, even if the causes of the crisis are multiple and complex and do not rest only or mainly with the EU.
L-R: Professor Gráinne de Búrca addressing the audience at the recent John M. Kelly Memorial Lecture
Professor de Búrca noted that the European Union was often impelled towards greater integration by such crises - though it had never previously encountered one of this magnitude. She was sceptical, however, that the primary response to the present crisis should be to move the Union closer to being a federation of states, in the hope that that would enable the EU to legitimate itself through the kind of 'ordinary process democracy' which underpins the legitimacy of modern states. Some useful steps in the direct of stronger democratization could certainly be taken - such as the direct election of the President of the Commission - but the more fundamental problem of a lack of popular legitimacy still needed to come to terms with the question of what the EU's raison d'etre is today. She suggested that the relationship between the EU's internal role (the continued assurance of peace, prosperity and supranationality) with its external role could be important in helping to generate an understanding of what the EU is for and why it matters. It was not just the place of states within the EU but also the place of the EU in the world that was important in understanding the rationale for European integration today. The EU plays an important role in global governance, in supporting processes of international cooperation and in tackling shared global problems such as climate change, anti-terrorism, democracy-promotion, and more generally in offering a different model of global governance from that of other major powers like the US and China.
L-R: Mr. John O’ Dowd, UCD School of Law, Ms. Sinéad Rooney, Auditor, UCD Law Society, Professor Gráinne de Búrca, Professor Colin Scott, Dean of Law
L-R: Mr Justice Nial Fennelly (Supreme Court), Professor Gráinne de Búrca, Professor Imelda Maher, UCD School of Law
