The Meso Level: Means of Interaction between EU and International Law: Flipping the Question: The Reception of EU Law in the International Legal Order

This paper is not the first in addressing the relationship between international and EU law. In fact, and as also noted in the Introduction to this Special Issue, ever since Van Gend & Loos the ‘autonomy’ of the Union (by then the Community) proved to be a source of theoretical debates on the issue.1 Studies focused on the ways in which international law was received in the Union’s legal order (often applying domestic constitutional analogies involving terms such as monism and dualism), or they addressed the hierarchical position of international law among other norms (often concluding that it was placed somewhere between primary and secondary law). In other words, most studies so far have focused on the effects of international law on and in the EU and the question to what extent the EU could be said to be bound by international norms.2