The Wind of Change. On Some EU-related Transformations of German and French Judicial Discourses

The ‘transformative power of Europe’ is a promising standpoint to shed light on national attitudes and beliefs formed in the course of centuries, as well as on paths taken by legal systems more recently. The paper seeks to unravel some - more or less cryptic - legal changes driven by the EU integration process in both the German and the French judicial discourse. In doing so, it argues that the souveraniste stance taken by the Bundesverfassungsgericht, as well as the ‘constitutional identity’ turn of the Conseil constitutionnel, contain the seeds of a new representation of what German and French constitutional judges consider to be their role in the relationships between EU law and domestic law.