ABSTRACT
The mythical underpinning of Europe is a story about a few far-sighted men who decided on a visionary supranational project with the implication that the European people's have since then been welded together in ever-tighter forms under enjoyment of peace, prosperity and welfare. The myth is derived from the banal history of the European construction itself, first born as an institution, which aimed to solve the historical conflict between Germany and France over coal and steel. According to conventional economic theory, market development requires harmonization of standards in order to guarantee free and equal competition. In the conventional view, normative rules and legislation provide the framework of politics. The law constitutes the arena in which politics performs and in which conflicts are being resolved. The potential for European politics was far from exhausted. The original idea of a European rescue of the nation state with the federal dream as a kind of undercurrent eroded under de Gaulle.
