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The evolution of the European Community (EC) towards a supranational constitution is charted by combining three different perspectives. First, an examination is made of the major features of the integration process since 1959, which argues that the European market and polity developed symbiotically, as the activities of economic actors, organized interests, litigators and judges, and the EC's legislative and regulatory organs became linked, to create a self‐sustaining, dynamic system. Second, the ‘constitutionalization’ of the treaty system is investigated, and the activities of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) surveyed; among other things, constitutionalization secured property rights for transnational market actors, expanded the discretionary powers of national judges, and reduced the EC's intergovernmental character. Third, the relationship between the ECJ and the national courts is considered, focusing on how intra‐judicial conflict and cooperation have shaped the production of specific constitutional doctrines; through these ‘constitutional dialogues’, the supremacy of EC law was gradually achieved, rendering it judicially enforceable. Overall, the chapter situates the development of the European legal system within the overall process of European integration.

Reviews the existing literature on the manner in which the Greek transition from authoritarian rule to democracy was effected, and evaluates the role that the European Community and its member states played both in the transition process and in the subsequent democratic consolidation. It argues that the channels of influence were supplementary, rather than central or decisive, and that the EC and its members cannot properly be labelled as ‘exporters’ of democracy within the transition process. The influence has rather been felt in the consolidation phase, with the EC acting as a ‘guarantor’ or an ‘underwriter’ of democracy.

The Eastern enlargement of the European Union poses risks to European Community environmental policy. Eastern and Central European countries have difficulty adopting the environmental chapter of the acquis communautaire, the common body of legislation. The widespread use of transition periods for adopting the acquis may lead to a partial renationalisation of environmental policy-making.

This chapter analyzes the competences of the Community and the European Union (EU) to adopt sanctions against individuals. It argues that, de lege lata, neither the EU nor the Community have the competence to adopt sanctions against private individuals. If, however, such measures were to be adopted within the EU, certain parts of the procedure, such as identifying those that will be targeted with sanctions, would have to take place under the first pillar (Community law). The structure of the chapter is as follows. Section 1 focuses on the competences of the Community to adopt individual sanctions. Section 2 focuses on the two Union pillars (Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) and Police and Judicial Cooperation in Criminal Matters (PJCC)). Section 3 analyses how the current way of adopting individual sanctions threatens the competence distribution between the three pillars of the EU (horizontal division), while Section 4 looks into the power balance between the EU and its Member States (vertical division). Section 5 addresses the changes under the Lisbon Treaty and discusses to what extent the existing problems are resolved by the new provisions.

This chapter examines the quality of procedural and judicial protection from Community regulations and demonstrates that judicial review of Union lists is not only necessary from the perspective of the individual, but that such a review is also required by European law. The structure of the chapter is as follows. Section 1 examines the protection offered to those targeted by European sanctions giving effect to Union lists of terrorist suspects. This includes both protection from Community and Union law. Section 2 discusses different avenues that lead to judicial review of Union law. Section 3 briefly analyzes the protection from Union listings before the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), while Section 4 examines the possibility of judicial review of Union law in national courts. The starting point for the latter examination is the Opinion of Advocate-General Mengozzi in the case of Segi. Section 5 analyses the interplay between the different courts in Europe. It attempts to point out how the decisions of the ECtHR and the national courts influence the rulings in the EU courts. A conclusion wraps up the discussion.

Is European integration still being driven, as it used to be, by intergovernmental agreement, or is the mainspring now located within the European Community itself? This chapter explores the autonomy and the influence of the EC's supranational organizations and the extent to which they can act as engines of the integration process, focusing in particular on the executive activities of the European Commission. In terms of the larger project of the book as a whole, its primary emphasis is on supranational organizations and the extent to which they can drive the integration process along the continuum between an intergovernmental and a supranational polity. It begins with a theoretical discussion of the role of supranational organizations in the integration process, and then presents some basic hypotheses about the variables underlying variations in the autonomy and influence of supranational agents such as the European Commission, the European Court of Justice, and the European Parliament. It then examines problems of subjecting these hypotheses to empirical verification, with particular reference to the activities of the Commission. It concludes by arguing that supranational autonomy and influence cannot be rightly understood in terms of a simple dualism between ‘obedient servants’ and ‘runaway Eurocracies’, but in terms of variance along a continuum between the two.

This chapter explores the widening gap between economics and politics in Europe. It discusses four main themes: the gradual evolution of the policy agenda at the European level, the geographical expansion of membership, the changing nature of common institutions and ‘governance’, and the changing attitudes of the citizens of the EU and member states. It argues that despite the continuous expansion of its policy agenda, the EU remains largely an economic system with an increasingly complex institutional setup with no proper political base. For years, European governments have been talking about establishing a political union as a counterpart of economic and monetary union; what they have achieved is cooperation in various policy areas, including foreign policy and internal security, and limited institutional reforms, which have little to do with political union.

An examination is made of the way in which national courts have reacted to European Community law, in particular to the claim to supremacy over national law contained in the jurisprudence of the European Court of Justice. The discussion begins with a brief account of the Community’s supremacy doctrine. This is followed by an analysis of the reaction of national courts to this claim. The focus then shifts from positive law to the normative evaluation of a number of issues central to this topic. The chapter concludes with an overview of the political science literature that has considered the reasons for the reaction of national courts to the claims made by the Community’s judicial institutions.

An examination is made of the emergence and institutionalization of a new policy domain for the European Community (EC): environmental protection – a domain that did not exist before the signing of the Single European Act (SEA) of 1985, when the Member States formally recognized the EC's legislative authority in the field, and the strengthening of these competences in 1992 by the Treaty of European Union and in 1997 by the Treaty of Amsterdam. Partly owing to lack of Treaty basis, and partly because of factors to be discussed in this chapter, the influence of the legal system on the development of the EC's policy has not been as pervasive as it has been for the main categories of law and policy established under the original Rome Treaty. The first section, ‘The Policy Domain’ provides a brief overview of the evolution of environmental protection as a supranational field of governance. The second focuses on the attempts of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) to manage the relationship between freedom of trade (free movement of goods) and the EC's environmental policies, showing that this case law served to legitimize the EC's competences in the field before the SEA. The third section assesses the Court's interactions with the EC legislator and the Member States from the perspective of delegation theory, examining both what happens when the ECJ acts as a trustee of the Treaty, and when it functions as an agent of the legislator, i.e. when it is asked to resolve disputes about the meaning of provisions contained in EC statutes; no evidence was found that the ECJ regularly defers to the interests of powerful Member States, rather, it has pursued the ‘Community's interest’, broadly conceived, even when engaging in routine statutory interpretation.

A distinctive feature of the modern regulatory state is the extensive delegation of powers to politically independent institutions (agencies, boards, commissions, tribunals), and this delegation of legislative powers to unelected policy- makers has always been somewhat problematic from the viewpoint of democratic theory. The American regulatory state has grappled with this issue for more than a century, and regulatory legitimacy is becoming an increasingly important political problem also in Europe, both at national and Community levels. In the United States the ‘non–delegation doctrine’ was the first attempt to resolve the normative problems raised by the emergence of a modern system of administrative regulation, and found widespread acceptance, but the delegation problem is considerably more complicated in the European Community/European Union (EC/EU), where various initiatives have been enacted. In both the United States and in Europe, constitutional doctrines against delegation have unravelled because the practical case for allowing regulatory discretion is overwhelming, so it is impossible to study the politics of regulation without first understanding why political principals choose to delegate rule–making powers. This is the subject of the first section of this chapter, which then goes on to analyse the relation between delegation and agency independence using the concept of political property rights, and to discuss the future of European regulation, and the politics of institutional change.

To sustain a viable social science of law and courts, testable propositions, appropriate research designs for testing those hypotheses, and comparative materials are needed; Ch. 4, and the two papers within it, discuss and use three strategies for building theory through testing and comparing. This second paper, which was originally published in the American Political Science Review in 1998, employs econometric and other modes of statistical analysis as well as qualitative ‘process tracing’ to evaluate specific causal propositions about how European Community (EC) integration and the construction of the European legal system (as enforced by the European Court of Justice) have proceeded. The research design constitutes a mixed means of testing: (1) deductive derivation of hypotheses from materials developed in prior comparative research, (2) collection of data to operationalize the theorized variables, (3) testing of the hypotheses through quantitative data analysis, and (4) cross-checking of these results and exploration of other theorized relationships or dynamics (qualitatively). The research leads Stone Sweet and Brunell to propose a theory of European legal integration (i.e. the process by which Europe has constructed a transnational rule-of-law polity), which integrates three interdependent causal factors: contracting among individuals, third-party dispute resolution, and the production of legal norms. The theory is tested, with reference to the EC, in two stages: first, the construction of the legal system is explained and the relationships between the three key variables are analysed over the life of the EC; second, the impact of the operation of the legal system is examined on governance (i.e. on policy processes and outcomes) at both the national and the supranational levels.

Presents a historical institutionalist account of the development of supranational governance. Focusing on the cumulative impact of the European Community's organization and rule‐making machinery, it argues that, over time, institutional effects like path dependence and lock‐in overwhelm the capacities of national governments to control the course of integration. This is due in part to the fact that governments tend to focus on short‐term interests, while being unable to calculate long‐term consequences of delegating authority to EC institutions. It is also due to the forging of multi‐dimensional relationships between societal actors and EC institutions, such as the European Court and the European Commission, by which information asymmetries develop to the advantage of EC organizations vis‐a‐vis national governments. Various examples of this process can be seen in areas of social policy, such as gender equality and workplace health and safety.

The previous chapter showed how transnational activity, the adjudication of the European Community (EC) law, and EC lawmaking had developed symbiotically to determine much of what is important about European integration. This chapter provides a more detailed sectoral account of how the adjudication of one class of trading disputes gradually, but authoritatively, undermined the intergovernmental aspects of the EC, while enhancing the polity's supranational, or federal, character. Assesses the impact of adjudicating the freer movement of goods provisions of the Treaty of Rome on integration and supranational governance, focusing on the problem of non‐tariff barriers, as governed by Arts. 28–30 (EC). Proceeds as follows: first, the treaty rules on intra‐EC trade are examined, hypotheses derived about how the domain could be expected to evolve, and the argument advanced is contrasted with alternatives; second, in a section ‘Judicial Governance and Market‐Building’, the emergence is tracked of the basic doctrinal framework (the Dassonville framework) governing the domain, an analysis made of the aggregate data on adjudication in the sector, and the impact traced of the European Court of Justice's case law on the decision‐making of other actors, including the European Commission and Member State governments; third, the mutation of the framework that occurred in the 1990s is discussed – an event that was heavily conditioned by the endogenous development of the law itself; the chapter concludes with an assessment of the findings in light of the pertinent scholarly debates about the impact of the European legal system on the greater course of market‐building and political integration.

The evolution is charted, through adjudication, of the rules governing sex equality in European Community (EC) law. The first section, ‘The Normative Structure’, provides an overview of the Treaty of Rome rules and secondary legislation that constitute the domain of sex equality, while the second examines how Art. 141 (which provides that male and female workers shall receive equal pay for equal work) evolved once it had been constitutionalized by the European Court of Justice. Section III, ‘Judicialization: The Court and the Legislator’, focuses on the relationship between the Court, its case law on sex equality, and the production of directives by the EC legislator; the impact is also briefly discussed of the Court's rulemaking on national judicial and legislative processes; topics included are indirect discrimination, occupational pensions, pregnancy and maternity rights. In the fourth section, ‘Adjudicating Sex Equality Law’, an analysis is made of the aggregate data on litigation and adjudication in the field, focusing on how precedent‐based lawmaking has organized the development of this area. The conclusion addresses a range of theoretical issues.