EUROPEAN LAW I. Free Movement of Goods

摘要

The surveys of the law of the free movement of goods carried in the Quarterly since 1989 have followed a largely consistent pattern. The Court's case law interpreting the nature and purpose of Article 28-30 provides an unfailingly intriguing glimpse into, first, the division of power between the Treaty-protected market freedoms and the intervention of the national regulator and, second, into the allocation of responsibility in the shaping of the European market between European Court and the EC's legislative institutions. The readier the Court is to treat national measures as baniers to trade, the deeper the incursion of EC law into national regulatory autonomy. And vice versa. The wider the scope allowed to the possibility to justify barriers to trade, the more room for manoeuvre is handed back to national regulatory autonomy - and the more weight is placed on the process of legislative harmonization or, increasingly, other forms of policy coordination at EC level as the way to advance integration. And vice versa. All these trends are in view in the period covered by this survey. The complex institutional rhythms reveal that the creation of the internal market was not a short-term project that was completed in 1992, nor even an enterprise that gently begged to have a few loose ends tidied up before being triumphantly pronounced historical fact. In reality the internal market, as an exercise in creating a unified economic space underpinned by a constitutionalized system of supra-State legal rules in a politically fragmented but interdependent environment, is one manifestation of the extraordinary exercise in multi-level governance which is evolving in Europe. Systems of this complexity do not stop fluctuating; 'free' markets are politically contested.