113
Second working session — The impact
1955 comment foresaw that these would shape ‘the constitutional develop-
ment of the Community’ (
4
).
Nonetheless, Article 177 of the Treaty establishing the European Economic
Community in 1958 changed the face of governance beyond the state.
Article 177 provided the linchpin connecting the legal systems of the suprana-
tional and national legal orders. To be sure, already under the ECSC, munici-
pal courts were also Community courts bound to promote the Community.
But in terms of their functioning, the ECSC still left municipal courts alone.
The reference action of Article 177 changed all this with ‘consequences more
far-reaching than may appear at first sight’, as Gerhard Bebr observed the
same year (
5
).
In the first reference action,
De Geus
v
Bosch and Others,
Advocate General
Maurice Lagrange astutely recognised that this new reference procedure was
‘designed to play a central part in the application of the Treaty’ (
6
). And in
the second reference action,
Van Gend en Loos
, the European Court of Justice
promptly laid the judicial foundation for an autonomous legal order of the
new Europe.
The Decision
There were two parts to
Van Gend
: the first was normative, the second
institutional.
The normative aspect of the decision was its recognition that the subjects
of the new legal order ‘comprise not only Member States but also their nation-
als’ (
7
). The objects of normative concern in the Community were henceforth
not just states but also individuals. Moreover, these individuals were ‘brought
together in the Community’ and ‘called upon to cooperate in the functioning
of this Community …’ (
8
). In this turn to include the individual, the decision
(
4
) E. Stein, ‘
The European Coal and Steel Community: The Beginning of its Judicial Process’
, 55
Colum. L. Rev. 985 (1955).
(
5
) G. Bebr, ‘
The Relation of the European Coal and Steel Community Law to the Law of the
Member States’,
58 Colum. L. Rev
.
767, 794 (1958).
(
6
) Case 13/61 [1962] ECR 45, at 56.
(
7
) [1963] ECR 1, at 12.
(
8
) [1963] ECR 1, at 12.
