Европейское сообщество: к вопросу о юридической природе международной организации

Abstract

The present article aims at analysing the international legal aspects of the legal nature of the European Community as a unique regional organisation. This issue has been incessantly debated by international lawyers for almost fifty years, always giving rise to new points of view, indeed, sometimes right opposite ones. An attempt is made in the article to compare and analyse different points of view on the legal nature of the Community. First and foremost, it concerns the notions of the adherents of the idea of the EC as a state-like organisation and also the supporters of the view on the EC as one of the so-called 'supra-national' international organisations. It is very important that the article gives a comparative analysis of the EC and 'classic' models of state-like establishments (particularly, a federation or a confederation). The article investigates the issues of international legal personality of the EC and analyses the peculiarity of the organisational structure and competence of the EC organs; an emphasis is made on the necessity of differentiating between such notions of the European Community and the European Union, which, though often used to denote the same phenomenon, are not the same from the legal point of view.