Semantics of European Law

• Published date: 01 June 1999
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0386.00071
• Author: Peer Zumbansen
• Date: 01 June 1999

Semantics of European Law*

Peer Zumbansen**

I The Language of European Law

Hugh Collins has put forward the idea of private law being a society’s language that is

entangled in the grown structure of the nation state.

1

This idea implies strong

scepticism about the prospects for an ‘ever closer union’ predominantly based on a

unified system of law. According to Collins, the emergence of European law pre-

dominantly causes the disintegration of what could formerly be regarded as a Member

State’s legal culture. He describes legal culture as embodying a sphere of social

interaction, where sanctioning power is institutionalised and rule making follows from

a centralised system of autonomy and control. This sphere is undergoing structural

and institutional changes, resulting from the fragmentation of social productivity and

cultural identity. As a consequence, the civil law based separation between private and

public law has lost ground and may be replaced by both functionalist and

contextualist models of law that possess a high degree of adaptability to the contingent

demands of an ordering scheme beyond the model of ‘state’ and ‘society’.

If we now look at more than forty years of European Community law, we must first

clarify our perspective, or, the historically and culturally based bias from which the

analysis of this body of law is to take place. To decipher the language of European law

we will need a better understanding of our own. The task, then, might be to account

for the semantic contents

2

of the categories that we apply to new and disturbing

phenomena in our social reality.

II Culture, Tradition and System

It is precisely this constellation that is so welcoming for the two volumes edited by

Gessner, Höland and Var ga , and by Micklitz and Weatherill. The first volume brings

together some of the most canonical readings in sociology of law, legal theory and

legal history that have been produced in Europe, while the second presents an excellent

overview of issues and documents in the context of European Economic law. Vranken’s

monograph is a rich and detailed study of the different modes of the Europeanisation

process of private law.

114 © Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1999

* A review essay on V. Gessner, A. Hölland, C. Varga (eds), European Legal Cultures, (Aldershot 1996);

H.-W. Micklitz, S. Weatherill (eds) European Economic Law (Aldershot 1997); M. Vranken, Fundamentals

of European Civil Law (The Federation Press 1997).

**Dr. iur., LL.M. (Harvard), lic.dr. (Paris), Research Assistant, University of Frankfurt Law School.

1

Collins, ‘European Private Law and the Cultural Identity of Member States’, (1995) 3 ERPL 353.

2

Cf, Margalit, ‘Gedenken, Vergessen, Vergeben’, in, G. Smith and A. Margalit (eds), Amnestie oder die

Politik der Erinnerung ( Suhrkamp 19970, 192–205, at 200.

European Law Journal, Vol. 5, No. 2, June 1999, pp. 114–126

© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1999, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK

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