The Critical Promise of the New History of European Law (original) (raw)

2012, Contemporary European History

The articles in this special issue test a range of historiographical assumptions-for example, about periodisation (most importantly when legal integration 'began') as well as about the definition of the purported object of study (the seemingly 'constitutional' character of the process of European legal integration)-which have been central to the interpretative baseline established by legal scholars and political scientists over the last several decades. Building on a similar critique of that baseline, this article argues that integration can profitably be understood, in legal-historical terms, as a denationalised expression of diffuse and fragmented (that is, 'administrative') governance. The basic elements of that governance emerged in Western Europe over the course of the interwar and postwar decades, and these elements have continued to shape EU legal history up to the present. Historians of contemporary Europe, whether legal or otherwise, are necessarily laggards-and thankfully so. The collective understanding of the contemporary world, and more particularly its change over time, inevitably deepens and becomes more nuanced when historians enter the scholarly fray. But that takes time. The discipline of contemporary history depends (not exclusively, of course, but importantly) on access to archival evidence. And during the time when the archives remain closed to historians, scholars from other disciplines understandably dominate the discourse and set the interpretative baseline against which the inevitably late-coming contemporary historians must later react. In the case of European law, important elements of this interpretative baseline have, over the last several decades, arguably become so widely accepted among political scientists and legal scholars that much of it stands as a kind of conventional wisdom. This is unfortunate, at least from the historian's perspective. The reason is that this baseline now includes a range of implicit historiographical assumptions-for example, about periodisation (that is, when legal integration 'began' in a scholarly significant