Miodrag Jovanović  Sovereignty – Out, Constitutional Identity – In: The ‘Core Areas’ Controversy of the EU Membership Abstract The Lisbon Treaty has sparked a new round of debate about the nature of membership in the European Union. Constitutional courts of Germany and Czech Republic played a prominent role in this debate. Parts of their rulings were framed in the traditional vocabulary of ‘sovereignty’. In this paper, I proceed by showing heuristic limitations of the concept of ‘sovereignty’ in addressing the intricate issue of the EU membership. I will, first, argue that none of the aspects of sovereignty – neither international, nor domestic – is significantly affected by the membership in the Union. Moreover, the sovereignty lenses necessarily put emphasis on the question of the final authority, which legal pluralists rightly reject as misleading in the EU context. This rejection is a result of a genuine “heterarchical” relation between the EU and Member States. As a consequence, the EU membership can be more adequately reconstructed through the constitutional identity lenses. This is what both constitutional courts to a certain extent did in their Lisbon rulings. The German court, in addition, tried to determine the “core areas” of competences beyond which the constitutional identity of Germany as a member state can be compromised within the EU. In the last part, I will challenge this course of action by demonstrating that it is problematic on a number of accounts. In this respect, the CCC’s approach of refraining from determining in advance and in abstracto what might be the ultimate defining elements of the Czech constitutional identity seems to be more commendable. 1. Introduction Ever since the process of European integration had started to accelerate, particularly after the introduction of the Maastricht Treaty, political and legal theorists began to search for an adequate methodological and conceptual tool-kit to capture the nature of an emerging and evolving EU polity. A common thread of  Full Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Belgrade (miodrag@ius.bg.ac.rs) Early draft of this paper was presented at the workshop ‘Constitutional identity and constitutionalism beyond the nation state’, at the World Congress of Constitutional Law, Oslo, June 16-20, 2014. Second version was prepared for a lecture at the Institute for Legal Studies of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, February 26, 2015. I would like to thank participants of both events for their useful comments. Special thanks go to Márton Varju (HAS CSS Institute for Legal Studies) and Marie-Pierre Granger (Central European University, Budapest), who were commentators at the Budapest lecture, and whose insightful criticisms helped me immensely to finalize this paper. 1