Perpetual momentum: directed and unconstrained?

Abstract

At the most general level, the perpetual momentum of 'integration through law' is driven by the substantive dynamics of legal doctrines extending the protection of individual interests and by procedural conditions facilitating the use of European law to challenge the institutional regimes of EU member states. Given the supremacy and direct effect of European law, and the decision rules of EU policy making, this momentum could not be halted through political or judicial intervention.

Experimentalism in theEU: Common ground and persistent differences

“…The criticism that the Court was somehow debarred from protecting social and economic rights was, in view of the ECJ's actual jurisprudence, reinterpreted as the assertion that, in vindicating social rights, the Court interpreted these rights as the claims of individuals to particular publicly provided benefits, thereby perversely creating a mechanism for destabilizing in the name of individual liberty intricate mechanisms of social balance established at the member‐state level. Thus, even in conceding that the Court and EU institutions generally are not necessarily neo‐liberal in terms of an exclusive fixation on market‐making, Scharpf sees them as irremediably dedicated to the furtherance of an individualistic liberalism at the expense of necessarily particular republican ideas of collective freedom and justice that can only be realized within national welfare states (Scharpf , ).…”

Introduction – the European Court of Justice and legal integration: perpetual momentum?

“…It is clear, however, that the EU has not yet entered such a phase. And as Fritz Scharpf (2012) emphasizes in his conclusion to this collection, the dominant role of the ECJ results in a skewed constitutional balance. While authors disagree as to the extent of the ECJ's activism, the pro-integrative role of the European court system as a whole -including member states' courts and the ECJ -is undisputed.…”

ECJ Judges read the morning papers. Explaining the turnaround of European citizenship jurisprudence

“…Secondly, accounts emphasizing the great degree of ECJ independence typically depict the Court as an "engine of integration". The Court is not only regarded as largely "unconstrained", but also seen as "directed" towards more integration (Scharpf 2012). If the Court tends to use its autonomy to promote integration, however, it should be particularly unlikely to reverse integration-enhancing jurisprudence and to return to lower levels of integration.…”