Les mots et les choses : le retrait de l’Union Européenne, Avant et après le traité de Lisbonne
Les mots et les choses : le retrait de l’Union Européenne, Avant et après le traité de Lisbonne

Summary/Abstract: In most of the cases, the debates on Brexit are focusing on economic considerations or on issues related to migration. The public discourse seems to have forgotten to emphasise un essential element of the European unification and, implicitly, of the retreat from this organization: maintaining the peace in Europe and impeding the resurgence of a new war. The founding fathers of the European Union desired the creation and incremental development of an irreversible unifying project. This explains the absence, in the treaties constituting the European Communities and, then, the European Union, of any reference to the possibility of States leaving the organisation. The 1969 Vienna Convention on Treaties provides, as the general rule, for the impossibility of a State to leave a treaty that does not expressly provide for such an option. This possibility is accepted only exceptionally and conditionally. In the case of the European Union, none of the exceptions provided by the Vienna Convention applies, therefore one may conclude that, before the Lisbon Treaty, the retreat from the European Union was not acceptable, unless by forcing the limits of positive law. As a matter of fact, until then, no Member State really raised the issue of retreat form the Union. After the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty, the option of quitting the Union has become possible and, moreover, relatively easy to activate, at least from a legal point of view. And the words call the facts: after the Lisbon Treaty, the theoretical, the hypothetical became real. Is this option for retreat, contrary to the departure point of the European Union, risking to become the keystone of the unifying project? Or, in the words of Georg Schwarzenberger, this possibility of retreat, even in theory, might transform the European Union from a “Community” into a “Society”?

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