Bridging the Widening Gap between the EU Treaties and the Agreement on the European Economic Area

Abstract

For almost 20 years now, the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) States Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway have been included in the EU's internal market through the Agreement on the European Economic Area (EEA). The continuing success of the EEA is threatened, however, by an ever widening gap between EU primary law and the still unchanged main part of the EEA Agreement. Unwilling to begin the strenuous work of updating the Agreement, the Contracting Parties place their trust in the ability of the courts to bridge the gap. While it is shown in this article that both the EFTA Court and the Court of Justice of the EU are indeed willing to go far in order to preserve homogeneity between EU law and EEA law, it is argued that there are limits to the courts' ability to remedy the failed updating of the Agreement.

Interorganizational Diffusion in International Relations

“…One may reason that overlapping membership enables regular interaction and more informal forms of cooperation that are not captured in the indicators composing the active EU influence measure. Specifically, the manifold interactions with EFTA have not induced an institutional strengthening of EFTA itself, but have engendered a new institutional arrangement-the European Economic Area-in which three out of four EFTA member states are subjected to the EU's institutions and rules (Haukeland Fredriksen 2012). Such idiosyncrasies, which may abound among European ROs, are impossible to capture in the wide-ranging statistical analysis.…”