About the project
Starting from the mutual interest in the history of law in European integration, we aim to rethink the notion of European legal ‘integration’, which assumes that the law generated by the Court of Justice of the European Union has been central to the process of European integration. This assumption in interdisciplinary debates – between lawyers, political scientists, political economists, and historians – is reflected in a research focus on the Court and its jurisprudence.
Two important trends in the literature have decentred the Court and its decisions. Reception studies have broadened our knowledge of the implementation of EC/EU law in the member states, while historical approaches to EC/EU law have introduced archive-based perspectives, not least to deconstruct the production of the European meta-narrative of ‘integration through law’.
At the same time, existing research has not explained the usefulness of ‘integration’ as an analytical concept to study European law. It has reproduced the idea of a binary relationship between the national and the European level; a relationship which is moreover characterised by the legal superiority of the European over the national level, thus reproducing doctrinal assumptions about the functioning of European law through its own metanarrative.
Against this background, we propose to continue the move beyond narratives of ‘integration’ and binary views of European and Member State law. We do this by focusing on the way in which a variety of actors have engaged with European law from the bottom up and combining methodological perspectives from both history and legal studies.
Objectives and outcomes
So far, we have organized workshops in Oslo in 2022 and 2023 with participants from all over Europe, coming from both law, history and political science. In April 2024 we convene again to finish a special issue based on papers from the preceding workshop.
We will continue working with the theme throughout 2024 and after that.