Overcoming the single country veto in EU Reform

This contribution to the Dialogue discusses the contribution by Federico Fabbrini, in which he proposes an innovative way forward for the reform of the European Union (F. Fabbrini, Reforming the EU Outside the EU? The Conference on the Future of Europe and Its Options, in European Papers, Vol. 5, 2020, No 2, www.europeanpapers.eu, forthcoming). Given the extreme difficulty of reaching a unanimous agreement among all the Member States on a formal revision of the European Treaties, he proposes the use of international agreements among “willing” States to take forward an ambitious reform. This would take the form of a “Political Compact” among those States, whereas the other States would not participate in it and would not be bound by its content. This contribution discusses the legal feasibility of this “Political Compact” option.