EU Law and Governance

The creation of an internal market that transcends all Member States has without doubt been the EU’s priority in the last sixty years. Conceptualising Europe as a market, however, requires a careful appreciation of how its economic objectives and its political objectives intersect. This chapter will focus on exactly this. We analyse what the different available methods of market integration, and their subsequent implications, tell us about the nature of the EU’s market. Which institutions have power, and why? What is the balance between economic interests and other values, and is that balance appropriate? In this chapter, we analyse the many parts to the puzzle that is the internal market. We will then focus on the two main regulatory techniques of the internal market: positive integration, through which the EU re-regulates the European market by the creation of new legislation and negative integration, which takes place where national rules governing the market are declared inapplicable as they impede the functioning of the internal market. Each of these regulatory techniques, as we will see, comes with its own assumptions, problems and implications.