ABSTRACT
History teaches us that the institutional configurations adopted to implement the principle of the rule of law can vary according to the cultural and political context, although all these configurations tend to vouch for the legality and legitimacy of political power. The European rule of law promotion has been tailored on the basis of two distinctive goals: reshaping the judicial organization of the candidate countries before they entered the EU and at the same time establishing instruments of coordination among the judicial civil and criminal policies of Member States. States turned out to be captured by political elite intertwined with the dominant party and masked behind heavy proceduralization and a comprehensive formal legalism. European judicial networks represent new arenas where the mechanism of legal harmonization, and legal coordination, are enacted. In continental Europe, where the civil law tradition has been and still is dominant, these very abstract and general aspects took a specific and culturally determined shape.
