Losing the European Identity: The New Challenge of TTIP

This article tackles the crisis of the state and of state sovereignty such as the results of the process of globalization. In fact, following the process of globalization, national law has lost its normative force as a symbol of positive legal order. The legislators’ intentions have been substituted by those of the judges and a denationalization of the states has followed the creation of the global juridical dimension. This has in part led to the communitarization of domestic law through shared values and spaces, and subsequently, to the increased flexibility of state powers; in part it has also led to the creation of a ‘soft law’, a law which is not binding in its legal strength but sufficiently strong in its programmatic structure to represent a break from traditional laws which have become too rigid for the logic behind European Union governments. The globalization of the lex mercatoria, overcoming the state dimension, has in fact highlighted the delay of politics and law in protecting the state identity, while technology and economy support new clear examples of challenge. The article pays particular attention to the preparatory works, elaborated by the representatives of the United States and the European Union, of a commercial treaty, called Transatlantic Partnership on Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), that intends to create the largest free trade zone in the world and that represents new forms of communication between economic and legal operators, geographically distant but brought nearer by economic interests that seek to undermine the last shreds of state sovereignty.