European Integration in the Constitutional Borderlands
The NextGenerationEU Model and the Struggle for Europe's Future
- Date
- 1 December 2026
- Time
- 12:00 -13:00
- Location
- Roeterseilandcampus - building A
- Room
- A3.01
Book discussion
Join us on Tuesday 1 December with Professor Päivi Leino-Sandberg when she'll be discussing some of the themes of the book.
Abstract
The European Union now finds itself in a liminal space-a 'constitutional borderlands'-between its traditional role as a prodigious producer of regulatory norms and a nascent, yet incomplete, role that seeks to develop fiscal capacities to achieve its goals. The NextGenerationEU (NGEU) programme adopted in the wake of Covid is at the heart of this shift. It defined a new model of non-transparent, executive-technocratic governance that was then repurposed to address the many challenges of the Russian war on Ukraine as well as other pressing needs.
This book provides the first comprehensive analysis of the design, implementation, and evolution of the NGEU model from its inception to today. It subjects the model's hidden mechanics to a critical examination, exposing the pivotal role of EU institutional legal advisers, operating behind closed doors, in facilitating revolutionary reinterpretations of the Treaties that effectively bypassed the democratic process to transform the nature of European governance.
Bio
Päivi Leino-Sandberg is Professor of Transnational European Law, University of Helsinki, and Deputy Director of the Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights. She specialises in EU constitutional and institutional law, engages often in multidisciplinary work and uses empirical methods. She has won cases on access to documents in EU Courts. Before returning full-time to academia in 2015, she worked for over 10 years as a legal adviser for the Finnish government, participating in numerous EU and international negotiations and Court cases. Her recent books include a monograph entitled The Politics of Legal Expertise in EU Policymaking (CUP 2021), and three co-edited collections of essays Law, Legal Expertise and EU Policymaking (CUP 2022), (In)visible European Government. Critical Approaches to Transparency as an Ideal and a Practice (Routledge 2023) and Dynamics of Powers in the European Union (Hart Publishing 2024).
