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Deuxième séance de travail — Les retombées
Second working session — The impact
PANEL DE discussion
◊
DISCUSSANTS
Van Gend en Loos
to(t) the
future
Catherine Barnard
PROFESSOR, UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
Introduction
The decision in
Van Gend en Loos
was the first – and possibly the most
significant – moment for the creation of the EU’s legal order. It is so central to
the DNA of EU law that no undergraduate EU law course would be complete
without a discussion of it. But having established its importance and articu-
lated its principle, we – as teachers – rarely return to discussing it. Putting it
another way, it’s like breathing: highly complex and fundamentally important
to human life but something we do not think about most of the time.
In this short comment, I would like to reflect not on the past but on the
future.
Van Gend en Loos
was a crucial decision of its time: without
Van Gend
en Loos,
EU law would not be as we know it today. But the EU is also a very
different entity today to the EEC of 1963. To paraphrase a famous advert, it
is bigger, stronger and longer. Bigger as a Union of 27 very disparate states;
stronger in terms of its place on the world stage; and longer in terms of the
extent of its powers and its geographic reach.
But the EU is also in a state of crisis: economic, financial and political. The
story is well known to us all. The EU institutions are working hard to turn
matters around – but in the face of ever greater hostility from an increas-
ingly large and vociferous part of its citizenry, many of whom feel ever more
