Public Lecture of Antonia Baraggia

Much has been written on the multiple crises the EU is facing. From the economic and monetary crises to the refugee emergency, and then to democratic and rule of law backsliding in Hungary and Poland, the EU is facing an unprecedented set of challenges and tensions, which question the nature and the sustainability of the EU integration process itself. In light of these features, a key question emerges: how is the EU managing this tension? Or, in other words how is the EU tackling ‘federal’ issues that emerge from the multilevel EU construction? 

Looking at the EU reaction to the main crises, we can follow a fil rouge which brings us to a literally pervasive and (almost) omnipresent tool: the tool of conditionality.

We define conditionality in general as “the link between certain benefits and the respect of given conditions or a given behavior”. The lecture will discuss the different kinds of conditionality (economic, spending, rule of law conditionality) that have been deployed or proposed to deal with the multiple crises of and within the EU.

Antonia Baraggia is Assistant Professor of Comparative Law at University of Milan, Department of National and Supranational Public Law. She is Principal Investigator of the project CONFEDERAL on fiscal federalism and social rights, awarded by the Cariplo Fundation. She has been Visiting Fellow at Fordham University School of Law and at the Institute of Federalism (University of Fribourg). She holds a PhD in Public Law from University of Turin. She serves as one of the members of the Executive Board of the Younger Comparativists Committee (YCC), American Society of Comparative Law. Her research interests include the role of courts, economic and financial crisis, socio-economic rights, fiscal federalism considered in a comparative perspective. She authored three books and several publications in Italian and in English on the effects of the financial crisis on national constitutional systems and on the European Union, on the economic conditionality, on fundamental rights protection in comparative perspective and on the dialogue among Courts.