ATTITUDE OF THE EUROPEANS TOWARDS THE EUROPEAN COURT OF JUSTICE 

Nakvakina Ekaterina Vladimirovna, Candidate of historical sciences, associate professor, sub-department of theory of state and law and political science, Penza State University (40 Krasnaya street, Penza, Russia), katrion84@mail.ru

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Background. Having sharply increased its actual authority, the European Court of Justice is an extraordinary significant body in the EU structure. This article has two aims: 1) to find out court cases that could cause erosion of states-members’ so-vereignity and be potentially negative for interpretation by the population; 2) to record and analyze changes of the Europeans’ attitudes to the European Court.
Materials and methods. The research is mainly based upon questionnaires of the Eurobarometer, carried out since 1974 twice a year according to a special sampling. The author used the comparative method to analyze Eauropeans’ position varieties in different countries.
Results. It has become clear that the Europeans have mostly sympathized the Institutions of the European Union after the conclusion of the Maastricht Treaty of 1992. At the turn of the centuries the trust to the Institutions has decreased. After the survey of the East European countries in EU in 2004 and in the beginning of the global economic crises in 2008 their rating has been constantly decreasing.
Conclusions. The European public opinion is an extremely complex and multi-layer phenomenon being subject to dynamical changes. Up to now the citizens of EU have not overcome mass skepticism, typical for the period after the beginning of the global economic crises of 2008. However, the European Court of Justice, as it was not directly involved in unpopular governmental decisions, should be a little more trustworthy than the European Commission or the European Parliament. Nevertheless more than one third of the citizens (35 %) have a negative attitude to it. And in Greece, Spain, Portugal, Cyprus the soecific weight of malevolent citizens exceeds 50 %!

European Court of Justice, European public ppinion, trust and distrust to European institutions, decisions of the European Court of Justice, sovereignty of the EU countries.

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