My guest for this episode is Julio Baquero Cruz — novelist, translator, professor of EU law, and member of the Legal Service of the Commission.

In 2018 he published a book called ‘What’s left of the law integration?’ in which he observes that the European Union is going through a difficult period, a traversée du désert. He describes the waning of the initial impetus behind European integration and a resurgence of the idea that the nation state is the ultimate political unit. He notices signs of decline in European law, even signs of disintegration. But the book is not defeatist. He also describes acts of resistance, especially in the case-law of the Court of Justice. More importantly, he encourages us to look again at the beginnings of the law of integration to find new meaning for European law today.

Julio's book combines philosophical contemplation with legal-technical detail, and so does my conversation with him. We talk about one of the founding fathers of the law of integration, Pierre Pescatore. We discuss political speeches, from Thatcher to Merkel to Scholz. We take a deep dive into the Weiss judgment of the German Constitutional Court. We talk about the theory that European integration was mainly a means of ‘rescuing’ the nation state. And finally, I ask him how we can reclaim the law of integration.

Mentioned:

• Julio Baquero Cruz, What’s Left of the Law of Integration?, Oxford University Press 2018
• Julio Baquero Cruz, Karlsruhe and its Discontents, EUI Working Paper, 2022
• Pierre Pescatore, Le Droit de l’Intégration: émergence d’un phénomène nouveau dans les relations internationales (1972)
• Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940)
• Alan Milward, The European Rescue of the Nation State (1992)
• Margeret Thatcher, Speech at the College of Europe (1988)
• Angela Merkel, Speech at the College of Europe (2010)
• Olaf Scholz, Europe is our future, Speech at Charles University Prague (2022)
• C-62/14 Gauweiler
• C-493/17 Weiss
• BVerfG Gauweiler (2016)
• BVerfG Weiss (2020)
• BVerfG Lissabon (2009)
• BVerfG Maastricht (1993)
• BVerfG Honeywell (2010)

Book recommendations:

• V.S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival
• W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn
• Olga Tokarczuk, Flights 

Comments? Guest suggestions? Email me at felix@europafelix.eu.