Summary: 1. Introduction. – 2. Approaches to Determining the Content of Economic Sovereignty. – 3. State Sovereignty within the EU. – 4. Relativity of Economic Sovereignty of EU Member States. – 5. Ukraine’s Steps Towards European Integration. – 6. Conclusions.
One of the most significant modern examples of political and economic integration for Ukraine is the EU, given the plan for European integration. In gaining membership in this integration entity, states face the issue of delegating their powers to the Union. The issue of modification of state sovereignty in the context of the EU’s relations with member states and candidate countries for EU membership is acute, which raises concerns about the forced restrictions on their state economic sovereignty.
The methodological basis of the study are such general-science and special methods as historical-legal, dialectical, comparative-legal, and others. The historical-legal method was used to study the genesis of the content of the legal categories of ‘economic sovereignty’, ‘sovereign debt’, and the stages of European integration. The usage of the dialectical method provided a comprehensive study of the process of forming EU economic policy, as well as defining the ratio between the categories of ‘economic sovereignty restriction’ and ‘restriction of sovereign economic rights of the state’. By using the comparative-legal method, the paper reveals the specifics of the approaches of individual states to the legal regulation of relations to ensure economic sovereignty and economic security of the state.
The study, based on the experience of the new EU member states, has shown that European integration as a whole contributes to changing the volume of sovereign powers of states during the implementation of economic state sovereignty. However, the authors conclude that such a process is twofold: on the one hand, factors that objectively reduce the economic sovereignty of countries through the delegation of their sovereign rights are increasing, and, on the other, most states voluntarily and consciously accept such restrictions to obtain economic, political, and social benefits.