The Interpretive Approach to EU Integration.

Matters concerned with integration and law often rest upon the vexed understanding of legitimacy. The deepening and extension of EU legal and political competence continually begs the question as to whether there is a sufficiently sturdy democratic foundation upon which integration sits. Along with this goes the implied question as to how we will come to know when this is achieved. At the heart of integration is, therefore, the important epistemological claim about the constitutional or legal language required to possess an adequate sense of what is 'new' about the EU as a political project and how this can be 'accommodated' alongside the familiar state constitutional tradition, as a means into questions of the legitimacy of the broader legitimacy of law and politics beyond the state. This paper suggests that this epistemological dilemma has stimulated a dualistic approach in constitutional theory. There is the conceptual or analytic approach which is overtly influenced by the positivist tradition. Here the concern is with the resolution of how to correctly describe the relationship between the competing claims of legal authority within the legal orders, and how to correctly understand the doctrine of supremacy. The second approach, is the normative and seeks to outline what ought to be the features or criterion of a common political/constitutional life in the EU, here we find Professor Weiler's doctrine of constitutional 'tolerance' and the arguments over the so-called 'no-demos'. The paper argues that understanding can only be achieved through dissolving this dualism, and to conceive integration in the EU as a practice which must be understood by adopting an interpretative conception of law, which reveals the common experience of the political in the EU and also how we can come to know this. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]