REGIONAL ECONOMIC INTEGRATION AND STATE SOVEREIGNTY

Economic integration, being the all over world process, proved to be especially successful on the regional level. The WTO is giving support to different arrangements of regional economic integration, recognizing the desirability of increasing freedom of trade by the development of various more liberalized frameworks, including customs union and a free-trade area. The experience of already existing economic integrations, especially EU, gives rise for discussion on the changing structure of world community, where states being integrated in supranational organizations are allegedly losing their sovereignty or at least part of it. It is more and more often that international lawyers speak about the concept of state sovereignty as deprived of political background or prefer such wording as “limitation of sovereignty or sovereign rights”. Being the central point of the equality of nation’s principle, the idea of sovereignty needs a careful treatment to prevent undermining the pillars of International legal order. This article attempts two issues assessment of the traditional concept of state sovereignty, being challenged by supranationalism of regional economic integration