The political and legal culture of European integration: An exploratory essay

Typically and importantly, in exploring the systemic aspects of the Union in our attempts both to reach conceptual understanding as well as, instrumentally, to explain its success and failures, we reach out to the political and the legal. As regards the former, our systemic approach is to focus on institutional structure and decisional process. As regards the latter, our systemic approach focuses not on the substantive, material, primary rules of Union law but on what we commonly call the “legal order” and its own operating system—the systemic secondary rules and principles that hold together the substantive content. The interaction between the political and legal for long has been a mainstay of the field, a rich and productive seam, the mining of which has enabled us to give a broader and deeper understanding of both the conceptual and the operational. In this exploratory essay, I reach out to prior questions as regards both the political and the legal, questions concerning the culture that undergirds political structure and process as well as legal order. Political and legal culture are “prior” in an ontological sense, they inform specific institutional arrangements and, at times give them meaning. Culture, including political and legal culture, is never static. It may inform the specific institutional arrangements, but, in turn, it is itself informed, shaped, and modified by the arrangements in a continuous cycle of interaction. This poses a formidable methodological Gordian knot, which may explain why, despite our longheld understanding of the importance of culture in any systematic analysis of polity, it has received somewhat less attention in European Union studies. My way of cutting through the knot, rather than unraveling it, has been to examine the temporally “prior,” the prior-in-time, through what, I hope, is a fresh look at some of the most noted foundational instruments (texts) of European integration. This is an inevitably limiting methodology since it cuts out the dynamic, that continuous