Introduction

The perceptions of crisis and the need for revenue raising to fund the EU’s objectives, including the repayment of debt, are creating a new impetus for the study of differentiated integration in EU tax law. In order to address orthodox conceptions of Member State sovereignty in taxation this book will propose to conceptually clarify differentiated integration and improvements to the interpretation and therefore the workability of the legal mechanisms of differentiated integration in the EU legal order. The resulting research will demonstrate how the challenge of unanimity can be overcome by using the conceptually clarified flexibility, potentially in the status of a principle, to enact tax measures to raise revenue and repay the debt.