Legal Aspects of Disintegration: Lessons of States’ Withdrawals from European Regional Organizations

INTRODUCTION. Viewed for a long time as an outstanding example of restoring durable peace on the continent and a major precondition for its prosperity, the European integration project is increasingly running existential risks. The precedents of States’ withdrawals from the main European regional organisations – the European Union and the Council of Europe – command a critical review of both their experience and the perspectives for their continuing existence. While the aforementioned events were unique in nature, they have shaken in their own ways the long-established architecture of Pan-European cooperation and prompted in-depth studies of political and legal models of States’ withdrawals from European regional organisations.

MATERIALS AND METHODS. The study is based on a broad ensemble of international and national norms and case-law that have shaped the Great Britain’s exit from the European Union. The analysis has been nurtured by an array of sources connected with the long negotiation process and the parallel legal and political processes within the UK. Mass media publications have been used along with official speeches and statements by high-level lawyers and politicians. The research also benefits from an in-depth study of the doctrine and practice, including the commentaries by direct actors of the pivotal events. Beyond the traditional methods of legal analysis the author has used historic and dialectic approach with a view to combining the study of the formal legal sense of the desintegration processes with their systemic understanding as interconnected elements within the broader dynamics of international law and international relations.

RESEARCH RESULTS. The study has analysed through the prism of Brexit the legal aspects of desintegration as a complex process of the State’s desengaging from a highly organised supranational union. On the one hand, the article reviews the international-law dimension of the desintegration process through the denunciation of the statutory treaties and the conclusion of new ones with a view to a «soft exit», thus ensuring a progressive transformation of the intra-union relations into new formats, cutting off multiple connections, while preserving some others. On the other hand, the article explores the way the desintegration is framed and its consequences managed in national law. The progressive transformation of the nationaly rooted elements of the European legal order requires thousands of new legal acts, let alone the review of a more voluminous body of the EU-related case-law through national judicial decisions.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS. The geopolitical shifts in Europe and the world, allied with the unprecedented deterioration of the political and economic situation within the European Union itself, raise doubts at both its continued leadership and even its capacity to survive in its present format. The current international context therefore commands a review of the Brexit experience in a comparative perspective, taking it as a highly sophisticated legal model, albeit not the only one, of withdrawal from the regional integration project. While the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the EU presents notable differences with Russia’s withdrawal from the Council of Europe, which deserves a separate study, certain parallels have been identified between the two phenomena both in terms of their framing in international and national law and in terms of their significance for further desintegration on the European arena. 

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