ABSTRACT
The following chapter continues the effort (see Joerges 1994a, 1996a, 1996b; Everson 2003a) to trace a common path between the distinct disciplines of law and political science, to find the interdependence between the factual and the normative, to address facticity and validity within the integration process. This is no easy task. Law, we argue, must renew its perceptions of reality and open up its normative and dogmatic structures to factual demands. Political scientists engaged in integration research should, by the same token, take the law’s normative structure seriously and open up their analytical and empirical models to this legal ‘reality’. There are good reasons to undertake such efforts: Europe’s constitution is too important to be left to lawyers; but it is also something that cannot be grasped by empirical and analytical approaches that are closed to consideration of this normative dimension within the ‘real’ world.
