The EU's sense of the Rule of Law and the issue of its oversight

The chapter addresses the much debated role of the European Union in defending its Treaty art. 2 values even inside the Member states’ borders. The nature of the EU as a two-levels' system is admittedly the reason for a peculiar complexity of the issue. But some common places are discussed that might still foreclose an appropriate approach to the problem. To the forefront are brought questions, often overlooked in this context, concerning the meaning of the Rule of law that the EU upholds and its practice, the possibility of a "transitive2 notion of that normative ideal, its relation to democracy, both in the conceptual sense and in the EU contextual frame