The EU, a legal requirement

The European legal integration process must take place right away or the EU risks being advantageous only for its elite.

The storm clouds gathered over the European Union, still reeling from the tsunami that has rocked its economy and public and private financial markets, are showing no signs of dispersing. Many are calling for a return to the old-style ‘international community’ founded on national self-interests. The EU’s detractors want to slam the door in the face of every innovative process, hurtling member states towards dark and unknown future scenarios. Fans of the old nationalism, who nostalgically hark for a presumed, idyllic and unhistorical past, forget that while the EU may have disappointed at times, it has also achieved important goals — first and foremost peace, that non-negotiable bond between European peoples.

The process of legal integration of the EU member states is highly complex: unique in its substance and dynamics, it differs from all other international legal processes and systems.

This process is unique because the ‘quantitative’ developments in the creation of Europe – the addition of member states, the broadening of the European institutions’ scope and the creation of new agencies – have gone hand in hand with significant ‘qualitative’ progress, driven by the on-going changes to the integration process, which have slowly came to define the European model and as a result EU law in a much more incisive and specific way compared to other legal systems.
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