A quoi ‘tient’ la Cour de justice des communautés européennes ? Stratégies commémoratives et esprit de corps transnational

Abstract

The present article explores the foundations of the authority of an international court, the European Court of Justice, which has neither a supranational professional corps nor a state apparatus to rely on. Based on a corpus of hitherto unexamined commemorative writings, we show the pains a judicial elite has taken to maintain a transnational esprit de corps since the 1970s. Festschriften, laudations and other jubilees are the locus of a transnational effort to establish both the institutional identity of a Court whose legitimacy is fragile and the contours of a “community” of support which the Community courts draw on for their authority to pronounce “verdicts” on Europe.