Starting from the mutual interest in the history of law in European integration, we aim to rethink the notion of European legal ‘integration’, which assumes that the law generated by the Court of Justice of the European Union has been central to the process of European integration. This assumption in interdisciplinary debates – between lawyers, political scientists, political economists, and historians – is reflected in a research focus on the Court and its jurisprudence. Two important trends in the literature have decentred the Court and its decisions. Reception studies have broadened our knowledge of the implementation of EC/EU law in the member states, while historical approaches to EC/EU law have introduced archive-based perspectives, not least to deconstruct the production of the European meta-narrative of ‘integration through law’.
At the same time, existing research has not explained the usefulness of ‘integration’ as an analytical concept to study European law. It has reproduced the idea of a binary relationship between the national and the European level; a relationship which is moreover characterised by the legal superiority of the European over the national level, thus reproducing doctrinal assumptions about the functioning of European law.
Against this background, we propose to continue the move beyond narratives of ‘integration’ and binary views of law situated between Europe and the member states. We do this by focusing on the functioning of European law ‘from the bottom up’ and a variety of actors.
We aim to keep up this thriving conversation by inviting interested scholars to our second workshop that will be held in Oslo in November 2023. This year’s workshop will interconnect actors’ engagement with European law and with legal texts. We ask that paper proposals start from a specific legal text to study how some actors have used it to shape conflicts and relations (call for papers). The workshop aims to develop from our first workshop organised in November 2022 (program).
At this workshop, we will engage with the creation of EU law from a legal-historical perspective. With a focus on actors, structures and institutions producing the law, we will approach the historical creation of EU law starting from a range of legal texts. This will serve as a methodological springboard to study the processes that gave meaning to the texts within many important areas of European law, for example different aspects of social welfare law. By studying the historical genesis and reproduction of EU law from this perspective, we hope to advance our understanding of the social process that has been popularly dubbed “European integration”, as well as to disentangle it from its own mythology. Read the full call for papers here.
The main part of the workshop will be presentations of work-in-progress papers by scholars from a number of European countries and research environments. We aim to make the workshop a constructive space for developing both the papers as well as our collective thinking, and will finalise the contributions as a special issue or an edited volume following another workshop in Oslo on April 4-5, 2024. As we expect all participants to have read the short draft papers and prepared for the discussions, we keep presentations to 10 minutes to allow for discussion.
Thursday 9 November we will start with a thorough introduction to the scientific agenda of the workshop, and continue with paper presentations and debate and concluded by a more general discussion on the topic of the workshop introduced by Morten Rasmussen (University of Copenhagen) and Christophe Hillion (University of Oslo). Friday, 10 November, we will have another series of paper presentations before we round off the workshop.
Beyond European Legal Integration is hosted by the Research Group for Law, Society and Historical Change//Faculty of Law, University of Oslo. The workshop is part of the project International Welfare law financed by the Ministry of Labour and Social Inclusion that was initiated in order to contribute to build a critical academic professional environment linked to the meeting points between EEA law and national social security law, through research, teaching and communication.
Program
Thursday, 9 November
9:00 – 9:15: Coffee and fruit
9:15 – 9:45: Welcome and introduction by the organizers
9:45 – 11:00: Paper presentations, session 1:
• European Integration and the Rule of Law as Social Capital: The European Proposal for a Multilateral Investment Court, Guillaume François Larouche (University of Copenhagen)
• Making a Living Instrument: the Discovery of the European Convention on Human Rights in the Netherlands and its implications, Wiebe Hommes (University of Amsterdam)
• Discussant: Lola Avril
11:00 – 11:15: Coffee break
11:15 – 12:30: Paper presentations, session 2:
• Helen Marshall goes to Court. State Retirement, the ECJ, and the History of Law from Below, c. 1986-1993, Mala Loth (University of Oslo)
• It all started with a low wage, Anna Quadflieg (Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory) Discussant: Cristina Blanco Sío-López
12:30 – 13:30: Lunch in Stuene, Professorboligen
13:30 – 15:00: Paper presentations, session 3:
• “A community frame to [national] habits and traditions”? A Socio-historical Account of the Integration of European Legal Professions (1957-1977), Lola Avril (University of Eastern Finland)
• Enforcing European environmental law from below: the case of the post-Seveso directives, Karin van Leeuwen (Maastricht University) & Koen van Zon (Studio Europa Maastricht)
• Private-interest actors as catalysts for actions under public law: Legal mobilisation of private interest actors in the preliminary ruling procedure, Monika Glavina (Erasmus University Rotterdam)
• Discussant: Brigitte Leucht (University of Portsmouth)
15:00 – 15:30: Afternoon break
15:30 – 17:00: Plenary debate, with introductions by Morten Rasmussen (University of Copenhagen) and Christophe Hillion (University of Oslo)
18:00 – 21:00: Dinner at Eik Restaurant in Universitetsgata 11 for the main seminar participants
Friday, 10 November
9:00 – 10:30: Paper presentations, session 4:
• Human Mobility Rights as a Legal Utopia? Critical historical legacies in the building of the EU's Free Movement of Persons, Cristina Blanco Sío-López (University of La Coruna)
• From New Legal Order to New Legal Order: Towards an Intellectual History of Pescatore's Law of Integration, Jacob van de Beeten (London School of Economics)
• Constitutional Identity — A Story of a Politicization of the EU Integration, Katarzyna Krzyzanowska (European University Institute)
• Discussant: Karin van Leeuwen
10:30 – 10:45: Coffee break
10:45 – 11:45: Paper presentations, session 5:
• Allodoxia in national European law: Symbolic misperceptions and the petty bourgeoisie of European integration, Magnus Esmark (Norway Inland University of Applied Sciences & University of Oslo)
• Lawyers against European Union: The Maastricht Judicial Review 1992-1993, David Lawton (German Historical Institute London and Queen Mary, University of London) • Discussant: Koen van Zon
11:45 – 12:00: Final remarks by the organizers
12:00 – 13:00: Lunch in Stuene, Professorboligen
Registration
The seminar is funded by the project Internasjonal trygderett.