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Moravcsik's The Choice for Europe puts forward a distinctive approach to explaining the 'grand bargains' by which the European states constructed European integration between the 1950s and 1990s. One notable exclusion from The Choice for Europe however is any detailed engagement with European legal integration, even though the creation of European law and the growing powers of the European Court of Justice must be among the most important European developments during these decades. Inspired by Moravcsik's scholarship, employing more common approaches to enforcement and escape in trade treaty systems as an explicit alternative outcome, and calling attention to the particular economic and social context of post‐war European trade, this article outlines a more 'liberal intergovernmentalist' approach to European legal integration during the first four decades of European integration, and proposes an agenda for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the European Court of Justice's (ECJ's) two most famous decisions, Van Gend en Loos and Costa v. ENEL, are commemorated on their fiftieth anniversaries, attention has also turned to another of the ECJ's early decisions. On November 13, 1964, in Commission v. Luxembourg & Belgium, the Dairy Products case, the ECJ rejected the use of "self-help" countermeasures in the Community legal order, and therefore marked the fundamental distinction between European law and general international law. Drawing on writings by Robert Lecourt, Paul Reuter, and Paul Kapteyn, this paper demonstrates that a direct causal link between these three cases was recognized by ECJ judges and legal scholars as early as 1965. The historical evidence presented here therefore supports previous comparative analysis that has argued that these three decisions-- Van Gend, Costa, and Luxembourg & Belgium--should be acknowledged as profoundly interconnected, in that national court application of European obligations should be understood as a substitute for the enforcement of European obligations through inter-state countermeasures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The work of Burley and Mattli, Alter, and Stone Sweet, taken together, provides the dominant political science explanation for the supremacy of European law. This review identifies a range of empirical and theoretical difficulties with this explanation, including the lack of a specified alternative outcome, an overemphasis on national constitutional rights, a limited understanding of the possible relationships between national law and ‘ordinary’ treaty obligations, ambiguity on the essential question of whether national political institutions could unilaterally legislate contrary to European law, and the failure to provide an explanation for state behaviour compatible with European law supremacy. The paper then sets out a research agenda, emphasizing the need to identify independent variables which could produce, depending on their values, outcomes like the EU which rely on states accepting the supremacy of treaty obligations or, alternatively, tit-for-tat regimes like the World Trade Organization which rely on bilateral reciprocity enforcement mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The politics of open international markets are frequently characterized as a Prisoners’ Dilemma, where states’ incentives to adopt protectionist policies are restrained by trading partners’ threat or use of retaliatory exclusion mechanisms. However, because Ricardian theories of comparative advantage suggest that unilateral trade openness enhances aggregate welfare, states whose domestic political institutions are encompassing – where the policymaker is responsive to a large proportion of the population and can authoritatively coordinate policy across diverse issues – have incentives to support open international markets without the threat or use of retaliatory mechanisms by other states. This explanation for the existence of an open international market has implications for theoretical and empirical research in international organization, as well as for discussions on the possibility of ‘self-contained regimes’ in international legal scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]