Page:ELO 1(1), 113–125. Here be dragons legal geography and EU law.pdf/4

116   Floris de Witte

2. Why EU legal geography?

What makes legal geography and EU law such a fascinating mix? At least five characteristics of EU law mean that legal geography can offer very valuable insights into the nature and ‘lived experience’ of European integration. Ultimately, the aim of the project of EU legal geography is to fill a gap that is becoming increasingly visible in EU legal studies, wherein it struggles to understand and articulate the resistance against the project of integration. This needs to be better understood not in isolation from but as an irreducible aspect of the functioning of EU law. EU legal geography can tell us something about what it means to live in the EU and what it means to live under EU law. It offers an analytical framework that can make sense of the realities of European integration in a way with which traditional accounts of EU law struggle.

A first, almost practical, reason why legal geography would be a natural fit for EU lawyers is that, for better or worse, the EU regulates most policy areas in which legal geographers are interested. Around 18 per cent of EU territory, for example, is designated a Natura 2000 site under the Habitats or Birds Directives. EU law has harmonised public procurement, waste management, climate change responses and transport policy; it has rules on animals, agricultural policy, geographical indications, and regional and cohesion policy; free movement and competition law rules apply to ‘spatial questions’ as diverse as rental markets, tourism sectors, bookshops and genetically modified organisms (GMOs); and both the EU’s internal and external borders are regulated through EU law.

Secondly, and more conceptually, European integration is deeply, almost constitutively, spatial and temporal. Much of its authority resides in its ability to ‘localise’ or ‘deracinate’ symbols and markers of state authority (whether as obvious as through currency or borders, or as mundane as through cultural programmes or the mobility of products or people). EU law has for some time been considered as an instrument for the transformation of its Member States. Whether we look at the cases on EU citizenship or at the moral regulation of the internal market, what we see is the gradual but inexorable infusion of the EU’s values on the national level. These different technologies of integration create room for the formation of novel configurations of space, time and authority in our daily lives: something as mundane as a shopping trip in a local supermarket in Stockholm might expose the shopper to Italian culinary heritage, Polish sausages and a French cassière. European integration has always been focused on reconfiguring social space by challenging preconceived understandings of (material) culture and relational demands, and its authority depends more than ever on how it is perceived and experienced by its citizens. Understanding these dynamics of the ‘lived experience’ of EU integration better will allow us to better grasp the significance, challenges and opportunities for the use of law in the process of European integration.

A third characteristic of EU law that makes legal geography a natural companion is that the constitutive tension in both disciplines shows a remarkable overlap. As intimated, both are concerned with the interaction between the local and the central, the actual and the theoretical, the practical and the preordained. This tension has already been extensively analysed in EU law, where, on the one hand, the ‘uniform application throughout the Member States’ is one of its core constitutional tenets, while, on the other hand, local administration and courts have the ability to mediate the demands of EU law to account for local peculiarities. As Zoe Pearson has argued