Trilogues, Early Warning System and legitimacy. More efficiency and participation in the EU law-making process.

European Union’s multilevel governance issues have been of great relevance in the recent worldwide legal scholarship. On the one side, the European Union (EU) has improved its regulatory approach, but on the other the actual implementation of those policies has been increasingly moved to levels of governments closer to the people, whether national or sub-national. What happened is very well known in the EU legal system: it is called subsidiarity and it goes under the principle derived from federalist theories which stipulate that policymaking should occur at the lowest effective level. The principle of subsidiarity is not focused on powers allocation, but rather on the regulation of the use of powers between the EU and the Member States. Looking at the Treaty and the European Court of Justice (ECJ) case-law, one may find a very few policy areas which do not, at least potentially, fall, directly or indirectly, within the competences of the Union.