The European integration process is often presented in the literature as a ‘stopgo-cycle’, with spurts of rapid progress alternating with periods of stagnation. The first years of the European Community were marked by many significant advances. Internally, the Commission successfully completed the customs union, created a common agricultural policy and commenced the construction and operation of its own competition policy. Externally, it concluded preferential trading arrangements with former overseas territories, completed a round of trade negotiations within the GATT (the Kennedy Round) and twice engaged in complex enlargement negotiations. The increasingly close cooperation among the member states themselves, and between them and the Commission, led many to speculate that a ‘United States of Europe’ lay within reach in the not-toodistant future. When, in 1969-1970, the EC began a third attempt at enlargement and committed itself to achieving monetary union within the foreseeable future, it seemed as though a new period of acceleration was about to start. However, despite the successful enlargement (and some would say because of it) progress soon appeared to have stalled and the period from the 1970s to the mid-1980s is often depicted in the literature as the era of ‘eurosclerosis’ – a hardening of the arteries that could ultimately prove fatal. Suddenly member states appeared hesitant, almost unwilling, to take further steps to deepen the integration process. More importantly, they took measures to restrict rather than advance supranational decision-making within the Community.

THE COURT AND INTEGRATION

This lack of euro-enthusiasm, however, did not stop the Community expanding in areas that had been initially unforeseen. In particular the European Court of Justice kept developing at a staggering pace. This led to the paradoxical situation in which political analysts spoke of the EC in terms of eurosclerosis and stagnation, while jurists were increasingly comparing the European Community to a nascent federal state. It was the Harvard-based jurist, Joseph Weiler, who first brought these simultaneous developments of stagnation in supranational decision-making and progress in judicial supranationalism to the fore. Even more significantly, Weiler postulated a direct causal relationship between the two phenomena; he contended that the stagnation of European integration on the political front was the result of progress in the judicial field.