Lawyers, political scientists, political economists, and historians tend to agree that the construction of European law has been crucial to the process of European integration. There is also an increasingly interdisciplinary body of research supporting this assertion (e.g., Davies & Nicola 2017; Albors-Llorens, Barnard & Leucht 2021). At the same time, these interdisciplinary approaches to EU law have often focused on the Court of Justice of the European Union and its jurisprudence leading some scholars to call for the study of ‘EU Law’s Embeddedness’ (Rask Madsen, Nicola & Vauchez 2022).

Against this backdrop, the proposed panel wants to de-centre the Court by focusing on the role ideas and theories play in European legal integration. How are European laws constructed and where do they come from? What are the ideas and theories that underpin their creation, and by extension, the European integration process? How do these ideas and theories develop over time, and what actors are involved in translating them into policies and implementing them? In seeking to answer these questions, there is much that law, history, economics and political science can learn from each other’s ways of thinking about the construction of European law, and by extension, the process of European integration. This panel, organised as part of the EUFutures Research Network, brings together scholars from politics, law, and history to explore these different questions using a variety of perspectives.

Building upon, updating and extending earlier discussions on the discourses of Brexit (Buckledee, 2018; Donoghue & Kuisma, 2022; Freedman, 2020; Koller, Kopf & Miglbauer, 2019; Spencer & Oppermann, 2020; Zappettini, 2019), the paper investigates how, and interprets the particular ways in which 1) Brexit as a process and 2) the United Kingdom (UK) as an actor have been discursively (re)presented in EU soft-law measures such as non-legislative resolutions, opinions, recommendations, communications and notices. It takes an innovative approach to studying European Union (EU) law through the lens of discourse analysis. Working with a dataset of the EU soft law measures in the 2016-2022 period, the study surveys the discursive treatment of Brexit and the UK during: 1) the withdrawal process (2016-2019); 2) the transition period (2020); 3) post-transition period (since 2021), thereby covering all the transformative periods of the Brexit process and allowing for temporal comparisons. To this effect, the article draws on the insights of the discursive institutionalism theory (Schmidt 2008, 2020) and adopts the general orientation of the Discourse Historical Approach in Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough and Wodak 1997; Reisigl & Wodak 2001; Wodak 2011). As such, this linguistically informed inquiry provides critical insights into how the EU has used soft law to make sense - and shape reality - of Brexit, applied it to (re)produce shared meaning(s) and legitimised, through language, its perspectives of the UK as a (non)member state.

Cassis de Dijon is one of the most significant cases discussed in the predominantly legal and political science scholarship on the ‘European economic constitution’. The significance of this ‘landmark’ decision is based on its role in initiating the European Court of Justice’s deregulatory approach to creating the Community’s single market. In this interpretation, a key role is assigned to the doctrine of mutual recognition. But what really happened with this doctrine following the Court’s 1979 decision? How did the Commission arrive at its notoriously broad reading of the judgement? And how and to what extent did the judgement influence policy beyond the grand narrative of Cassis de Dijon, not least in the very sector triggering the preliminary reference to the Court: the alcohol sector? This paper promotes an actor-based approach combined with a multi-archival research strategy to focus on the policy consequences of mutual recognition. The chapter argues that while the Commission used mutual recognition and the Court’s deregulatory approach to promoting the development of the single market, through harmonizing the alcohol market, it also undermined Cassis de Dijon. A closer look at the negotiations on the Community’s alcohol market makes it difficult to retain a purely progressivist narrative about the development of the economic constitution and softens the broader interpretation of the Court’s judicial activism that started with Cassis de Dijon.

In this paper, we interrogate who really counts as European as we unpack the praxis of solidarity in the context of the free movement of persons. We focus on the relational dimensions of European solidarity in respect of two case studies pertaining to two groups of EU citizens whose mobility within the Union tests the extent and limits of European solidarity; namely workers from Central and Eastern Europe, specifically the transitional measures applied to these workers following the Central and Eastern European enlargements, and economically inactive EU citizens taking avail of the right to free movement. Applied to these two groups of EU citizens, orientalism provides us with a potent tool to investigate the idea of the European as it sheds critical light on how the European us is constructed in opposition to the other, and more specifically the internal other. Significantly, the deployment of Orientalism allows us to demonstrate how the ‘making’ of the internal Other is instrumental in forging the idea of the European. The use of Orientalism further enables us to show how the construction of the European exposes hierarchical relationships among EU citizens. Indeed, what emerges from our investigation is the creation of a group of EU citizens – internal others - whose partaking in European solidarity remains limited and contested on account of their failure to live up to what remains a market-based understanding of the ‘fully fledged’ European.