On the Legitimacy of Supranational Law in Europe

Commercial, scientific and private interactions and cooperations are increasingly conducted across national borders. Well-known examples of this process can be found in the sphere of biomedicine – from the so-called ‘abortion tourism’ up to the recent German debate on the import of human embryonic stem-cell lines. This tendency to cross cultural-moral legal borders raises questions about the moral and legal legitimacy of such international actions and the legitimacy of national and international regulations to regulate such topics.

This study deals with the scope and limits of institutionalised power, taking into consideration the traditional discussion of how morals and the law relate within the philosophy of law and the more recent debate between liberals and communitarians in political philosophy. In this context, the scope and limits of international norms addressed to pre-existing sovereign states are to be discussed.
This investigation aims at making a philosophical contribution to some of the current socio-political developments of the European harmonisation process.

This dissertation, written by Minou Bernadette Friele, M.A., was supervised by Professor Dr. Dieter Birnbacher at the Institute for Philosophy at the Universität Düsseldorf.