ABSTRACT
It has become commonplace in law and political science to analyse European legal integration starting with the ever-changing institutional order of Brussels. Long dominant, this ‘institutionalist approach’, however, tends to construe European construction mainly in analytical terms deriving – implicitly or explicitly – from the national construction of the state. The state has become a more or less clear Leitmotiv, even an implicit ideal type, in the effort to explain a whole series of European transformations: from processes of constitutionalization (in lieu of a constitution), to claims concerning the rise of European civil society (in lieu of actual participatory democracy participation). There is no doubt, of course, that the issues of constitutionalization and democratization of Europe, as we saw in the first part of this book, are both central and important, yet, European legal integration as a broader phenomenon can be captured neither by an analysis of only these processes, nor by other approaches that derive mainly from preconstructions stemming from the nation-state.1 Generally, this part suggests that it might be beneficial to examine these issues in the context of how a set of increasingly powerful free-market dynamics have come to influence European legal integration. The paradox is that these free-market dynamics are on the one hand institutionalized in the European treaty complex, and on the other hand only partly guarded by the supranational order provided by the European institutions. Hence European legal integration is neither just an institutional progression increasingly resembling the state, nor simply an entirely market-driven enterprise,
yet the tension between the two appears central for understanding the broader social construct of European Law.
