A. Disciplinarity

Before understanding the benefits of interdisciplinarity, it is essential to understand the rationales upon which knowledge is traditionally organised into disciplines. This first step is crucial because in order to be able to transgress disciplinary boundaries, we first need to fully understand the reasons and rationales behind the erection of dominant modes of categorising knowledge into distinct academic disciplines.Footnote ¹

Although the practice of organising knowledge into disciplines can be traced as far back as ancient Greek philosophers, the development of the disciplines as we find them today in the modern era is essentially a social construction resulting from the convergences of historical incidents, economic demands, and institutional constraints. Especially after the mid-19^th century, the advancement of disciplinary boundaries can be attributed to two major developments: (1) the rise of progressively complex and technologically refined societies led to an increasing demand for more enhanced levels of expertise; (2) enormous advances in the natural sciences invoked a strikingly narrow perspective on research objects and thereby contributed to the compartmentalisation of knowledge.Footnote ²

With regard to the former, it was the increasing complexities of European societies and the division of labour that came with them that was a powerful factor in the development of the disciplines. The reason for this was not only that the disciplines were able to prepare people for professions that required particular kinds of expertise; political and economic elites also increasingly recognised certain forms of disciplinary knowledge as entry requirements for certain professional careers as they gave the new professions legitimacy and standing by linking them to academic qualifications.Footnote ³ With regard to the second reason, during the Enlightenment period, vast progress was made in the natural sciences establishing a new view of nature as a type of well-functioning machine that can be reduced to universal rules and principles through new empirical methods. This kind of research necessarily came with a very narrow focus on the objects and reality that could be investigated. And the enormous progress that the sciences achieved as a result of limiting their perspective in this way constituted a powerful argument in favor of the continual development of scientific boundaries – both of the ‘natural sciences’ and of the ‘human sciences’.Footnote ⁴

These developments have not gone unchallenged. The stringent configuration of knowledge and the tendencies of over-specialisation that it produces have raised challenging counterarguments related to the self-perpetuating power structures that the disciplines uphold.Footnote ⁵ For instance, every discipline is characterised by certain discursive practices through which distinct ways of thinking and making sense of the world are upheld and which are primarily characterised by the use of a very particular type of vocabulary. It is not unusual to observe that scholars can often only communicate with peers from their own discipline.Footnote ⁶ The term ‘theory’, for instance, means something entirely different to social scientists than to legal scholars. This is equally so with regard to the term ‘realism’ which has an entirely different connotation for a legal philosopher than for a scholar of international relations, to name just a few examples. These linguistic barriers dividing the disciplines constitute more than simply divergences in vocabulary, however. The discursive practice of a discipline and the terms used therein also reflect idiosyncratic thought patterns through which the members of a discipline construct and maintain a concrete understanding of the world and themselves as human beings. They are characteristic of very distinct ways of thinking, solving problems, and recognising proposed solutions.Footnote ⁷ Such discourse dynamics and what they present no doubt allow members of a discipline to communicate effectively with one another and also contribute to a common collective identity that binds its members together.Footnote ⁸ But they also reinforce self-perpetuating power structures and a sense of exclusivity, which makes it difficult for scholars of other disciplines to penetrate the modes of thinking and communicating of a specific school of thought.

Yet this character of the disciplines, which is sometimes referred to as ‘tribal’, does not only have exclusionary but also disciplining effects.Footnote ⁹ The individual member of a discipline usually cannot escape the penalties and rewards of academic life through which the conformity with established ways of thinking and life are ensured.Footnote ¹⁰ Just think of job classifications at universities, peer reviews of submitted academic papers and research grant applications, or simply the natural desires of members of the discipline to be acknowledged by their elders – all these social forces make sure that “the academic’s head gets constructed” in certain ways.Footnote ¹¹ While these internal disciplining mechanisms often sit uncomfortably with the self-perception of many academics as independent and autonomous figures searching for total knowledge and truth rather than dependent conformists who work according to the modes of knowledge and thinking of an established social group, some authors have defended the discipline’s power structures. They have pointed out that the connections between knowledge and power in the disciplines are an indispensable basis for making new forms of knowledge possible.Footnote ¹² This might be true. But it also cannot be overlooked that if the relationship between knowledge and power becomes too rigid, it runs the danger of inhibiting the discovery of novel ways of looking at the world and its people. Currently, vociferous advocates encouraging scholars of their discipline to look beyond the border of their scholarly modes of thought usually have the upper hand.

B. Interdisciplinarity

Yet what is it then exactly that the call for more interdisciplinarity entails? In a more general sense, interdisciplinarity can be understood as part of a traditional quest for a wide-ranging, complete, and comprehensive form of knowledge about the world and the human condition that the fragmentation of the disciplines is unable to engage in.

More than one writer across the decades has attributed this understanding of interdisciplinarity to the study of philosophy. Aristotle, although he himself defined various areas of academic inquiry, insisted that philosophy is a universal field of inquiry that brings together all the different branches of learning ranging from the sciences and mathematics to psychology and sociology. Kant similarly classified every discipline ‘as a system in its own right’ that has to be treated as ‘as a self-subsisting whole’, while regarding philosophy as unconstrained by disciplinary boundaries.Footnote ¹³ In this view, the binding together of all forms of knowledge by an overarching synthesis defines the unique essence of philosophy.Footnote ¹⁴

Yet it is possible to tease out more fine-grained understandings of the term ‘interdisciplinarity’ that define it to mean any mode of interaction between two or more disciplines, which can reveal and transgress the constraints of academic specialisation.Footnote ¹⁵ In this view, if the old disciplines lose their inspiration and transformative potential and become unoriginal and humdrum, interdisciplinarity can be the cure. The dialogue and interconnection between two or more disciplines and the synthesis and interconnectedness that is thereby created can illuminate and renovate our understanding of the world and ourselves. This might involve either the interconnection of traditional methods of research in the respective disciplines with the methods of another discipline or the linking of the theoretical insight gained in other disciplines with that of the discipline the respective scholar has been trained in.Footnote ¹⁶ Whatever approach one chooses, they are all motivated by a skepticism about too rigid forms of tribalism in the academic disciplines; by a critical attitude towards too stringent forms of academic conformity with the objective to uncover “greater truth that transcends scholastic categories”.Footnote ¹⁷

This symposium is about how we organise knowledge in the specific discipline of the EU legal sciences and what it would mean to reorganise that knowledge into new alliances and configurations. To put it a bit differently, the symposium is about discovering forms of interdisciplinarity that would allow us to complement the knowledge of the EU legal discipline in areas where its thinking has become too rigid and inflexible with respect to existing and future challenges of EU legal developments.

A. The Identity of law as a discipline

Most generally put, traditional doctrinal research treats the law and legal systems as distinct and closed social institutions. It aims to understand the law through the examination of a fixed cosmos of authoritative texts consisting of primary sources, statutes, and cases, the relative prominence of which depends on the legal tradition and culture within which the legal analyst operates. By involving the use of unique concepts, interpretative tools, and critical techniques as the basis of analysis of these authoritative texts, the rules and principles of the law are being systematised against the internal logic of the coherent and consistent system of law. Rules and principles are either evaluated against normative conceptions of justice that are drawn from the philosophy expressed in the authoritative texts and cases or taken from moral philosophy directly.Footnote ¹⁸But traditional doctrinal research is not only concerned with the systematisation and evaluation of the said rules and principles through refined concepts and techniques.Footnote ¹⁹ It is also inherently prescriptive in that legal scholars usually endeavor to influence the development of the law;Footnote ²⁰ they aim to participate in the legal practice through making recommendations of how the law should develop and be transformed.Footnote ²¹

This traditional understanding of the discipline of law results in large part from the legal profession; it is founded upon and draws its peculiar character and identity from the rationale by which legal practitioners work and reason.Footnote ²² One reason for this is that the development of law as a discipline in most Western universities was originally a result of the perceived need amongst political and economic elites to acknowledge those engaged in the profession of the law with academic credentials.Footnote ²³ The legal profession has, therefore, strongly influenced the content and structure of legal education both through involving legal practitioners in teaching law as well as through accreditation processes by bar and law societies that determine university curricula.Footnote ²⁴

B. Understanding the conventional logic of the European legal discipline

The traditional disciplinary core of EU legal studies also involves the use of concepts, interpretative tools, and critical techniques in order to systematise and assess EU legal rules and principles against the coherent and consistent system of EU law and to generate recommendations and reform proposals about what EU law should consist of. Yet this traditional way of approaching EU law, which up until today constitutes an integral part of the EU legal sciences, can only be understood against the broader project of European integration.

European law has been regarded as an emancipatory process away from national orders and the limited political and legal thinking characterising them. It has been seen as a process that stands apart from and above the ethically and politically chaotic tribulations that national orders are regularly confronted with, as a newly established supranational system that disciplines the behavior of domestic polities and endeavors to bind them together in a new autonomous organisation.Footnote ²⁵ Yet this understanding of the EU legal system as effectively transforming domestic systems was clearly beset with contradictions because as much as it aimed to emancipate itself from preexisting domestic orders, it was strongly linked and dependent on the latter.Footnote ²⁶ To overcome such tension, a twofold approach was developed. First, the traditional doctrinal approach to the study of EU law, which is most clearly offered in Pierre Pescatore’s work, emphasised the comprehensive and autonomous nature of the EU legal order. In this view, the system of EU law was a self-sufficient coherent whole that functioned on the basis of newly established concepts, principles, and techniques that were different from those found in domestic orders and which EU lawyers continuously perfected with the purpose of overcoming the chaotic and power-driving dynamics of domestic orders.Footnote ²⁷ Just think of concepts like the autonomy or effectiveness of the European legal order, the principles of institutional balance, judicial review, loyal cooperation, and proportionality, or techniques like the teleological interpretation of EU law which the Court of Justice is so famous for. Every EU lawyer can easily identify them as part of the internal logic of the structured network of EU law that practicing lawyers as much as academics rely on when examining and interpreting the law.

The second strategy for mitigating the tension between the newly established supranational terrain and traditional domestic orders consisted in forcefully promoting the goals of the law of integration amongst practitioners. Through revolving doors between the EU institutions, legal practice and academia, a group of jurists advertised the view of the European legal system as constituting an autonomous and comprehensive whole. They persuaded key EU agents of the benefits of a legal and political culture of European supranationalism in an effort to make sure that European integration would live up to their desired telos of replenishing and overcoming the disparaging forces of domestic orders.Footnote ²⁸

The ‘Integration Through Law’ project initiated by Mauro Cappelletti, Monica Seccombe and Joseph H.H. Weiler can be seen as a critical engagement with Pescatore’s law of integration approach.Footnote ²⁹ More precisely, what it aimed for was to distill an idea of European integration that is free from any ideological groundings such as the supranational model of integration, which Pescatore’s project was grounded upon.Footnote ³⁰ For this purpose, the initiators of the project drew from two methodological approaches; one grounded in a comparative analysis of federal regimes with the purpose of comparing and contrasting similarities and differences between the federal elements of the European Communities and other federal-type system such as the United States;Footnote ³¹ another grounded in a governance lens in an effort to not only examine the content of the law but also the inclusiveness and plurality in processes of law making and the impact that law has on the ground.Footnote ³² Although the project was immensely successful in introducing new methods into the study of EU law, the project initiators’ goal to erect a neutral framework allowing for a non-ideological analysis of EU law has not proven entirely successful. The reason for this was the project’s grounding in a normative precept as to the desirability of federal forms of integration.Footnote ³³ Although the initiators repeatedly clarified that their underlying vision of federalism did in no way involve the construction of a homogenous federal European state, there was a strong ‘idée de base’ underlying the project assuming that it was a good thing to construct a European constitutional order based on the value of the individual in a way that respects and involves all Europeans citizens at all levels of government.Footnote ³⁴ In fact, one of the contributors of the project later admitted that the ‘Achilles’ heel of the Project was its normativity’Footnote ³⁵ as more integration was essentially regarded as desirable and less integration was regarded as unwanted.Footnote ³⁶

In sum, we can conclude that although the early approaches to the study of EU law underlay slightly different rationales, they were based in a strong vision of what European integration should look like;Footnote ³⁷ they had in common a sturdy directional pull towards an ever-closer European political community.Footnote ³⁸ Clearly, this does not mean that the EU legal sciences have not also borrowed from the insight and language of other disciplines, such as philosophy, political theory and theories of justice more broadly. We find a broad range of approaches specifying the philosophical foundations of EU law,Footnote ³⁹ justifying judicial law-making by reference to positivist and interpretive accounts of legal philosophy,Footnote ⁴⁰ criticising the predominant judge-centered approach of EU legal studies on the basis of republican principles of philosophy,Footnote ⁴¹ demanding the articulation and institutionalisation of different conceptions of transnational solidarity as a way to mitigating conflicts of justice in the EU,Footnote ⁴² or describing the European legal order as allowing for a plurality of authorities.Footnote ⁴³ Yet what these scholarly accounts rarely offer is an attempt to transgress the endeavor to reform the EU legal order towards a more functional and perfect union. Rather, through reliance on the said philosophical language and ideas, they aim to minimalise the many challenges and contradictions that the EU legal system and polity comprises through making suggestions about how the European legal and socio-political order could be better integrated and perfected on the basis of an ideal understanding of what a just European polity should look like.

This sturdy pursuance in the legal sciences for the creation of a more perfect European polity has come at a cost. For EU law to be able to allow national orders to further open up and integrate into the desired supranational order, it had to disguise the chaotic power structures and challenges of everyday life in the European community; only if its concepts, principles, and techniques are applied and expressed in an abstract manner allowing for its normativity to be immanent as opposed to factual could the authority of EU law be upheld and the goal of an ever closer union of people achieved. In the early years of EU integration there have been good reasons for the formulation of EU law in this way; yet nowadays one might wonder if it is not true, as one scholar has put it quite felicitously, that ‘the language and mentality of the founding years has left an inheritance that gets in the way of Europe’s understanding of itself today.’Footnote ⁴⁴

C. Making visible what has been invisible in EU law

Within the last three decades, a new body of scholarly approaches has appeared with the aim of uncovering what is hidden behind the allegedly neutral and apolitical nature of EU law. Through explicitly borrowing from the theoretical and methodological insights of other disciplines such as sociology, history, political science, linguistics and network analysis, these approaches aim to understand ‘what is really going on’ behind the high-minded and abstract way of rationalising EU law; to better grasp the institutional struggles, power relations, social and political battles that EU law is grounded upon and to uncover EU law’s hidden biases and injustices. Some have referred to these developments as the ‘methodological turn’,Footnote ⁴⁵ other as the ‘critical turn’Footnote ⁴⁶, in EU legal studies.

The first pioneering moves came from political science aiming to better understand how political and legal agents and their motivations shaped the institutional dynamics and power within the EU legal system,Footnote ⁴⁷ as well as sociological scholars focusing on the professional legal context of European law by drawing, amongst others, from Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the state and society and bringing empirical studies into the study of European law.Footnote ⁴⁸ Amongst others, sociologists revealed how the work of Euro lawyers has been a powerful initiator for the integration and liberalisation of the single market and disentangled the institutional struggles underlying the prominent and allegedly neutral concepts of EU law.Footnote ⁴⁹ From early times onwards also legal historians joined the effort of sociologists to break open the black box of doctrinal legal research through drawing from empirical methods and sources.Footnote ⁵⁰ They have, for instance, endeavoured to bring to the surface the many legal and political opposition movements that the constitutionalisation of EU law and the idealised narration of the EU as an ever closer supranational community have provoked.Footnote ⁵¹ They have, furthermore, disentangled the manifold contextual histories and narratives related to leading and minor personalities involved behind the scenes of the activities of the Court of Justice, thereby allowing for new understandings of the Court’s case-law.Footnote ⁵² In sum, we can say that these works have not only provided a range of new methodological innovations (especially quantitative empirical methods) and have drawn from novel type of data (such as archivable resources, translational document, or biographies), but have also contributed to a critical engagement with the traditional narrative of EU integration.Footnote ⁵³

Another form of criticism of EU law that is increasingly gaining importance focuses on the many social and economic injustices that underlie and provoke dominant concepts, principles and techniques of EU law. Drawing from critical theory and the insights stemming from political economy, representatives of this mode of thinking share the assumption that the law, in its pure and allegedly neutral form, is often incapable of critically dealing with the biases that structural shifts under economic liberalisation bring with it. Against this presumption, they do not only illuminate the forms of inequality and precariousness that are inherent to EU legal concepts and techniques;Footnote ⁵⁴ but also endeavour to disentangle the neoliberal biases of economic, environmental, and social sustainability that EU law provokes.Footnote ⁵⁵

The value of the two strands of research presented above cannot be emphasised enough. They have illuminated the motivations, strategies, and power struggles that political and legal agents of EU law and institutions are engaged in, disentangled the broader narrative structures that EU underlies, and have dissected the inherent biases prioritising certain social groups over others underlying EU law. By shifting the perspective from the analysis of the law as a coherent and cohesive system of rules to the actors, institutions, and biases underlying such rules, they have hence made visible what has remained invisible in EU law for many decades. Yet this way of analyzing EU law nevertheless misses an important dimension: because even if EU law is driven by competitive practices of dominant EU agents and institutions and contains severe overlooked biases, it unavoidably also always reflects and constitutes humanistic ideas about the community and the human condition that is distinct to the European polity. In order to complement the above insight with this humanistic dimension of it, a group of scholars has drawn from a variety of different interpretative methods taken from linguistics, theology, philosophy, and cultural and literary studies in order to be able to further improve our understanding of EU law, and, specifically, give expression to the European cultural and humanistic ‘capital’ that it represents and forms. They have investigated what EU law means and what forms of life it incites with respect to questions of personhood and citizenship,Footnote ⁵⁶ distributive forms of justice,Footnote ⁵⁷ forms of European society,Footnote ⁵⁸ and religious tolerance,Footnote ⁵⁹ to name just a few examples.

In sum, what we can observe in the European legal scholarship is a shift from legal concerns about the autonomous nature and integrative potential of EU law to socio-political forces, unjust biases, as well as humanistic ideals that EU law creates and informs. The new generations of European legal scholars share the endeavour and curiosity to ask novel research questions and to borrow from the methodological and theoretical insight of other disciplines in order to renew their understanding of EU law and the polity that it presents; thereby they aim to make visible what has for a long time been disguised by the dominant interpretation of EU law as an autonomous and consistent system with a distinctly enshrined telos.

This symposium does not attempt to reinvent the wheel, to introduce an entirely novel methodological approach or shift for EU law. The contributions submitted for this issue relate to some greater or lesser extent to the different schools of thought that have developed within the last two decades in the European legal sciences. Yet they aim to further deepen and expand the interdisciplinary toolboxes of the respective interdisciplinary approaches: not only through consciously reflecting on the unique benefits of their chosen interdisciplinary perspective, but also through displaying the advantages of their approach through showcasing and applying them to concrete legal questions and cases as opposed to only discussing them in an entirely abstract and theoretical manner.