The Uniting of Europe by Transclusion: Understanding the Contextual Conditions of Integration Through Law

Abstract:

Political science has discovered the European Court of Justice,’ as Armstrong notes in an article published 15 years ago, ‘[b]ut has it discovered law?’ Today, the answer to this question is an ambivalent one. Although political science has developed a certain sense of the structural necessities arising from the rules of law and the complexity of the judicial process in a multilevel governance system, it still lacks an approach that conceptualizes it as a self-contained framework of integration. Here, it will be argued that a contextualist approach could fill this gap in current research. From this perspective, the law itself — not, first and foremost, its most prominent actors — propels integration through a phenomenon that could be best described as a three-dimensional transclusion of the European legal order.