EC Law and the Sovereignty of the Member States in Direct Taxation

In order to develop a suitable framework for the analysis of the ECJ case law, it is first analysed what significance, if any, the concept of ‘sovereignty’ has in the contemporary supranational environment of the European Union. All too often, tax scholars equate ‘sovereignty’ with the concepts of ‘competence’ or ‘jurisdiction’. It will be established in this thesis that a much more specific and higher-level meaning is to be attributed to the ‘sovereignty’ concept, which goes beyond the strictly legal concepts of ‘competence’ or ‘jurisdiction’. The cornerstone of this thesis, however, is an extensive analysis of the case law of the ECJ in direct tax matters, including a comparison with its non-tax case law. A new kind of methodology is used in discussing the cases: they are categorized according to whether a discrimination – or a restriction – based analysis was applied by the ECJ.