‘70 Years of EU Law’ – The Politics of a Professional Language

Planck Institute in Heidelberg in January 2024 to discuss and celebrate ‘70 Years of EU Law’ based on a book written by lawyers working in the Commission Legal Service. The book invites us to look backwards at the great achievements of the past. It treats law as an essential, indeed quite indispensable, tool of the integration project. The article argues that examining more carefully European Union (EU) law as a professional language might enable us to see how policy goals turn into rules that we consider binding or authoritative and that make us believe in the beneficiality of whatever is being proposed as representative of ‘integration’. In addition to celebrating the role of lawyers in solving problems, we need to remain mindful of their contribution to creating problems; or defining what should be treated as a problem. Legal work is about making choices; and those choices privilege some values or interests over other values or interests. In the absence of Treaty change, it is the ingenuity of EU lawyers that has kept the integration going. And while this ingenuity has enabled the EU to respond to some very real challenges, it has also led to the capture of Treaty interpretation by a professional elite whose biases are hidden behind an impenetrable idiomatic language. This paper makes the argument for a broader grammar of EU law that would translate the choices between priorities into political terms and stop seeing democracy as a threat to the European Union, but instead, allow subjecting its legal and policy choices to critical debate.