It is an understatement to say that law is important in the process of European integration. Understanding the EU without understanding the particular (and peculiar) role that law has assumed in the first decades of European integration is impossible. By making it legally impossible for Member States to resist the application of both specific norms of EU law and the general objectives of European integration, EU law gets European integration ‘done’. The CJEU’s understanding of the EU legal order as something that is hierarchically superior and autonomous from national legal systems, however, irritates national legal systems, which are increasingly articulating limits to the process of ‘integration through law’. This tension has become more pronounced as the EU moves into policy domains that are politically more salient and touch on Member States’ core powersThis indicates a fragility at the core of an EU that is, fundamentally, a legal order.
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