Big Decisions in European Legal and Economic Integration: What Have We Learned?

This is the concluding chapter of a book that revisits the European Court of Justice’s Cassis de Dijon ruling. The book’s many chapters engage and update the 1994 article I published with Sophie Meunier ‘Judicial Politics in the European Community: European Integration and the Path-Breaking Cassis de Dijon Decision,’ which was our first piece of scholarship. Part I explores how European law scholarship has evolved since the Cassis de Dijon ruling offering a different perspective on what the book’s various authors expect to have found compared to what they then found. In our original article, Sophie and I focused on how the Commission amplified the Cassis ruling. Part I argues that ‘integration through law’ activism more broadly amplified the Cassis ruling, and this amplification went beyond the launching of a conversation about mutual recognition. Part II discusses sensibilities that are still absent from the conversation, concluding with a set of challenges for scholars who want to revisit the history of European legal integration. We need to approach the development of EU law over time from a global perspective, a perspective that critically reflects on the sui generis elements of EU law and openly explores and discusses how forces beyond Europe shaped European legal and economic integration.