European Union Law as the Constitutional Edifice of Europe - with additional remarks on its lessons and implications for Northeast Asia -

Apparently the European Communities and the European Union seem to be all based on “ordinary” or “usual” treaties because the Treaties establishing, supplementing or amending the Communities and the Union fit very well the definition of a “treaty” by the 1969 “Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties”. Nevertheless, the European Court (the highest judicial arm of the Union) refuses to treat them in that way: in the consecutive cases brought before it in the early 1960s, premising that the Community constitutes a new legal order, the Court has established two principles on which the Community/EU law stands: its direct effect and supremacy. This paper tried to show the hybrid features of the EC or EU law, together with comments on “The Treaty of Lisbon Amending the Treaty on European Union and the Treaty Establishing the European Community”, concluded in 2007 and going through country-by-country ratifications. And, finally, the writer thought about some lessons we could get from the experiences of the European integration.