European Legal Integration: Towards a More Liberal Intergovernmentalist Approach

Moravcsik's The Choice for Europe puts forward a distinctive approach to explaining the ‘grand bargains’ by which the European states constructed European integration between the 1950s and 1990s. One notable exclusion from The Choice for Europe however is any detailed engagement with European legal integration, even though the creation of European law and the growing powers of the European Court of Justice must be among the most important European developments during these decades. Inspired by Moravcsik's scholarship, employing more common approaches to enforcement and escape in trade treaty systems as an explicit alternative outcome, and calling attention to the particular economic and social context of post‐war European trade, this article outlines a more ‘liberal intergovernmentalist’ approach to European legal integration during the first four decades of European integration, and proposes an agenda for future research.