The emergence and consolidation of European Community law (later European Union law) was rendered possible by key legal and political actors drawing a map of supranational law with the key concepts of direct effect, primacy and uniformity. The underlying assumption was that the actual territory of the law, the law on the ground, would come to fit into the drawn map. However, the last two decades have seen trust on the transformative power of the map drawn through such concepts decline, not least due to related developments. First, what looked like residual points of resistance have become polarized sources of contention over the scope and meaning of EU law; (2) sheer indifference towards EU law has emerged as a relevant attitude, partially replacing acceptance or opposition. Both developments have not led not only to a crisis of European law, but also to an existential crisis of the very actors (the “cartographers”) in charge of drawing the map of European law.
