The transformation of Europe – and of selective exit 25 years after

TY - CHAP

T1 - The transformation of Europe – and of selective exit 25 years after

AU - Wind, Marlene

PY - 2017/1/1

Y1 - 2017/1/1

N2 - I first came across The Transformation of Europe (ToE) in 1993 when I had just started as a PhD candidate at the EUI in Florence. As a political scientist, I was admitted to the institute on a project about the changes in sovereignty in light of the European integration process, but was rather unsure how I should go about studying this phenomenon empirically. Many political scientists had at the time produced bookshelves theorising about ‘the post-sovereign condition’ (see Held et al. among others), but very few (if any) were able to delineate empirically what kind of transformation(s) Europe had actually been undergoing. Joseph Weiler's ToE was therefore an eye opener of dimensions to me, and I knew right from the very moment I first read it that I had found what I was looking for. Not because The Transformation represented a deep, empirical study of the ‘post-sovereign condition’; nor was it a philosophical piece about the destiny of the European nation-state. But it made intelligible how those dramatic changes we had all been witnessing in Europe since the establishment of the Common Market could be comprehended as an intimate – though not always intentional – interplay between the political and the legal spheres. European legal integration was not only presented in a way that was easily digestible for a political scientist. More importantly, ToE represented a fascinating narrative of the European constitutional development as a dynamic and creative field which otherwise rent-seeking member states were gradually seduced by. With ToE I also discovered a legal scholar who was in reality a semi-political scientist and whose splendid teaching of European law I was so lucky to be able to follow both at the EUI, where Weiler occasionally taught after having left for the States, and some years later when I visited him at Harvard Law School, where we were editing a book together. What I did not know in the early and mid-1990s but was to discover later, however, was that ToE not only ended up delivering the frame for my PhD dissertation, but also turned out to influence my entire academic career as a political scientist studying law and courts.

AB - I first came across The Transformation of Europe (ToE) in 1993 when I had just started as a PhD candidate at the EUI in Florence. As a political scientist, I was admitted to the institute on a project about the changes in sovereignty in light of the European integration process, but was rather unsure how I should go about studying this phenomenon empirically. Many political scientists had at the time produced bookshelves theorising about ‘the post-sovereign condition’ (see Held et al. among others), but very few (if any) were able to delineate empirically what kind of transformation(s) Europe had actually been undergoing. Joseph Weiler's ToE was therefore an eye opener of dimensions to me, and I knew right from the very moment I first read it that I had found what I was looking for. Not because The Transformation represented a deep, empirical study of the ‘post-sovereign condition’; nor was it a philosophical piece about the destiny of the European nation-state. But it made intelligible how those dramatic changes we had all been witnessing in Europe since the establishment of the Common Market could be comprehended as an intimate – though not always intentional – interplay between the political and the legal spheres. European legal integration was not only presented in a way that was easily digestible for a political scientist. More importantly, ToE represented a fascinating narrative of the European constitutional development as a dynamic and creative field which otherwise rent-seeking member states were gradually seduced by. With ToE I also discovered a legal scholar who was in reality a semi-political scientist and whose splendid teaching of European law I was so lucky to be able to follow both at the EUI, where Weiler occasionally taught after having left for the States, and some years later when I visited him at Harvard Law School, where we were editing a book together. What I did not know in the early and mid-1990s but was to discover later, however, was that ToE not only ended up delivering the frame for my PhD dissertation, but also turned out to influence my entire academic career as a political scientist studying law and courts.

UR - http://www.cambridge.org/dk/academic/subjects/law/european-law/transformation-europe-twenty-five-years?format=HB#hcOxLeiALDaipF5y.97

U2 - 10.1017/9781316662465.017

DO - 10.1017/9781316662465.017

M3 - Bidrag til bog/antologi

SN - 9781107157941

SP - 303

EP - 316

BT - The transformation of Europe

A2 - Poiares Maduro, Miguel

A2 - Wind, Marlene

PB - Cambridge University Press

CY - Cambridge

ER -