Journal ArticleDOI
The European Court's political power
TLDR
The authors examines why national courts agreed to take on a role enforcing European law supremacy against their own governments and why national politicians did not stop an institutional transformation of the European legal system which greatly compromised national sovereignty.Abstract:
The European Court has emerged as one of the most powerful political institutions in the European Union and the most influential international court in existence. National courts are the linchpins of the European legal system, making European Court decisions enforceable and creating an independent power base for the European Court. This article examines why national courts agreed to take on a role enforcing European law supremacy against their own governments and why national politicians did not stop an institutional transformation of the European legal system which greatly compromised national sovereignty. Competition between lower and higher national courts, each trying to enhance their influence and authority vis‐a‐vis each other, explains how national legal interpretive barriers and high‐court ambivalence regarding the European Court's declaration of European Law Supremacy was overcome. Politicians proved unable to reverse national court acceptance of European law supremacy, and institutional rules ke...read more
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International Norm Dynamics and Political Change
TL;DR: The authors argue that norms evolve in a three-stage "life cycle" of emergence, cascades, and internalization, and that each stage is governed by different motives, mechanisms, and behavioral logics.
Book
The political system of European Union
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors explained the EU political system and the decision-making procedures of the European Union, focusing on the role of the Single Market and the single market's role in the political system.
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What Makes the World Hang Together? Neo-utilitarianism and the Social Constructivist Challenge
TL;DR: Social constructivism addresses many of the same issues addressed by neo-utilitarianism, though from a different vantage and, therefore, with different effect as discussed by the authors. But it also concerns itself with issues that neo-UTilitarianism treats by assumption, discounts, ignores, or simply cannot apprehend within its characteristic ontology and/or epistemology.
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The asymmetry of European integration: or why the EU cannot be a "Social Market Economy"
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that integration through law does have a liberalizing and deregulatory impact on the socioeconomic regimes of European Union member states, but this effect is generally compatible with the status quo in liberal market economies, but it tends to undermine the institutions and policy legacies of Continental and Scandinavian social market economies.
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Who Are the “Masters of the Treaty”?: European Governments and the European Court of Justice
TL;DR: In this paper, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) escaped member state control, focusing on how differing time horizons of political and judicial actors, political support for the Court within the national judiciaries, and decision-making rules at the supranational level limit the member states' abilities to control the ECJ.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
The joint‐decision trap: lessons from german federalism and european integration
TL;DR: In this article, the authors explored the similarities between joint decision making in German federalism and decision-making in the European Community and argued that the fact that member governments are directly participating in central decisions, and that there is a de facto requirement of unanimous decisions, will systematically generate sub-optimal policy outcomes unless a "problem-solving" (as opposed to a "bargaining") style of decision making can be maintained.
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The Path to European Integration: A Historical Institutionalist Analysis
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors have criticised "intergovernmentalist" accounts for exaggerating the extent of member-state control over European integration, and they have investigated the impact of such accounts on European integration.
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The Transformation of Europe
TL;DR: In this article, a Paradox and its Solution: Exit and Voice in the European Community: Formal and Selective 2412 C. The Closure of Selective Exit 2412 1.
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Europe Before the Court: A Political Theory of Legal Integration
Anne-Marie Burley,Walter Mattli +1 more
Abstract: The European Court of Justice has been the dark horse of European integration, quietly transforming the Treaty of Rome into a European Community (EC) constitution and steadily increasing the impact and scope of EC law. While legal scholars have tended to take the Court's power for granted, political scientists have overlooked it entirely. This article develops a first-stage theory of community law and politics that marries the insights of legal scholars with a theoretical framework developed by political scientists. Neofunctionalism, the theory that dominated regional integration studies in the 1960s, offers a set of independent variables that convincingly and parsimoniously explain the process of legal integration in the EC. Just as neofunctionalism predicts, the principal forces behind that process are supranational and subnational actors pursuing their own self-interests within a politically insulated sphere. Its distinctive features include a widening of the ambit of successive legal decisions according to a functional logic, a gradual shift in the expectations of both government institutions and private actors participating in the legal system, and the strategic subordination of immediate individual interests of member states to postulated collective interests over the long term. Law functions as a mask for politics, precisely the role neofunctionalists originally forecast for economics. Paradoxically, however, the success of legal institutions in performing that function rests on their self-conscious preservation of the autonomy of law.
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Europe Before the Court: A Political Theory of Legal Integration
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