104
Monica Claes
Deuxième séance de travail — Les retombées
that can be enforced by the courts. Surely, the drafters of the Treaties had
included a European Court of Justice, and an infringement action to enforce
compliance by Member States. But direct effect together with its twin primacy
adds to this the technique of private enforcement by individuals before na-
tional courts, not only in those Member States where this is not unheard of –
such as the Netherlands where the case originated – but for all Member States,
even those where compliance was still a matter of international relations and
hence in the domain of the executive.
‘Quel eut été le droit des Communautés sans les arrêts de 1963 et 1964?’ (
4
).
For Robert Lecourt, who asked the question in the
Mélanges Boulouis
, the an-
swer was clear. Lecourt, one of the authors of the
Van Gend en Loos
judgment,
was a firm believer in the role of law and courts in the integration process. ‘Il
eût été contradictoire pour les États’, he wrote in
L’Europe devant les juges
,
‘de prétender instituer un marché commun, de mettre en place à cette fin des
institutions et des règles communes, mais de refuser à ces règles tout caractère
contraignant’. The story of how these ideas were translated into the decisions
in
Van Gend en Loos
and
Costa
v
ENEL
, and how they were then promulgated
and spread, has been masterfully told by Antoine Vauchez and others (
5
).
What interests me here, is the impact of
Van Gend en Loos
then and now,
beyond the scope of EU law both within the EU and beyond Europe. In this
vein,
Van Gend en Loos
may be said to have contributed to an unfolding trend
of strengthening the domestic enforcement of international law through their
domestic enforcement, because as Anne-Marie Slaughter and William Burke-
White have put it: ‘the future of international law is domestic’ (
6
). I will high-
light three different instances of the influence of
Van Gend en Loos
beyond the
scope of EU law.
(
4
) R. Lecourt, ‘
Quel eut été le droit des Communautés sans les arrêts de 1963 et 1964?
’, in
L’Europe et le droit, Mélanges en hommage à Jean Boulouis
(Paris, Éditions Dalloz 1991),
349-361.
(
5
) A. Vauchez, ‘“
Integration-through-Law” – Contribution to a Socio-history of EU Political
Commonsense’
, EUI Working Paper RSCAS 2008/10.
(
6
) A.M. Slaughter and W. Burke-White, ‘
The Future of International Law Is Domestic (or, The
European Way of Law)
’, 47
Harvard International Law Journal
(2006), 327.
