Saturday, March 15, 2014
Presidential Board Room (Omni Shoreham)
The Treaty of the European Economic Community (EEC) would help propel a fundamental breakthrough for the development of European law in a constitutional direction with the famous Van Gend en Loos judgment by the ECJ in 1963. To what extent did the design of the EEC treaty correspond to that judgment? What were the multiple motives behind the institutional and legal design of the EEC Treaty? This paper will explore the negotiations on the EEC Treaty from 1955 to 1958. It will be argued that the core design of the EEC treaty remained fundamentally ambiguous. On the one hand, the treaty was largely designed along the norms of international law directed to and controlled by member state governments, administrations and courts. One the other hand, the key objective of the treaty - the common market - would over time have a transformative impact on the member states and their internal relations. In combination with the still independent supranational institutions and the discreet elements of constitutional law inserted by pro-European lawyers, the potential existed that the EEC could be led down a different path institutionally and legally. It was this ambiguousness that the ECJ exploited its seminal judgment of Van Gend en Loos on in 1963, less than it was a clear-cut legal interpretation of the letter and the nature of the EEC Treaty.
