The EU’s Legal Identities and the Court of Justice of the EU

Abstract

This paper aims to analyse whether ‘economic integration through law’ still is one of the EU’s central identities. From the 1960s to the Maastricht Treaty of 1992, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) was considered to be one of the main actors creating rulings that allowed establishing a regulated single market. Since the 1990s, however, the Court’s contribution to this legal identity has been questioned, based on structural and policy-related factors. Structural factors refer to the Court’s perceived caution in its rulings; policy-related elements point to the idea that the Court’s rulings are considered to contribute not only to a pro-market identity of the EU, but to increasingly create a multifaceted identity, including the protection of human and social rights. The aim of this article is to analyse this alleged transformation through a study of the most salient decisions of the CJEU before and after the Maastricht Treaty in specific policy areas: the common market, social, health and human rights, EMU and economic governance. This selection of policy areas allows us to analyse whether the Court has indeed created an understanding of integration through law exclusively based on economic rights or whether the content of integration through law is also based on a more general understanding of the constitutionalisation of European integration beyond the establishment of a common market.