EU Law’s Future in a Fraying International Legal Order

What future awaits EU law as the post-1945 international legal order frays? Although both share a treaty-based, post-war pedigree, EU law rests on a legally articulated European society and on a constitutional core that gives its future a distinctive normative horizon. Drawing on Reinhart Koselleck’s concept of a horizon of expectation, the essay reconstructs Articles 1(2), 2 and 3(1) TEU as a framework for distinguishing continuity from disruption without collapsing legal analysis into prediction. It develops three scenarios for EU law by 2050. The continuity scenario encompasses legally plausible transformations within the horizon of an ever closer union, including differentiation, selective renationalisation and deeper defence integration. The atrophy scenario captures the erosion of EU law through aggressive nationalism, institutional capture, deadlock or normalised non-compliance. The statehood scenario tests whether geopolitical pressure and a heightened sense of European interdependence could move the Union across the threshold of federal statehood.