The Force and Forms of European Legal Integration

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of the integration of EU law into the national legal systems. By what title can EU law impose its norms on domestic legal orders, and so much so that the conditions in which the rule-making process is organized within the Member States are considerably affected? On what conditions can EU law be integrated? What consequences does such normative integration entail? The legal dynamics of integration produces different discourses of justification that can be defined within a general grammar of relations between legal orders. The purpose of the paper is to describe these discourses and their respective relevance in the actual course of integration.