M. Dawson & F. De Witte, EU Law and Governance (CUP 2022)
This textbook offers a fresh, accessible, and interdisciplinary take on EU law. In light of the current state of European integration, EU law cannot meaningfully be appreciated without understanding the political, social and cultural context within which it operates. The textbook therefore aims to answer one question: ‘what is the EU for?’ Using this central narrative, the authors situate the institutions, legal order and central policy domains of the EU in its context, offering students the tools to critically analyse and reflect on European integration and the consequences that it has.
re:generation Europe – ten ideas for another Europe (Palgrave McMillan, 2019)
This book sets out a vision for another Europe: one that cherishes diversity, listens to its public, and is sensitive to its younger generations. It is a call for a re-imagination of the European project, as a response to the three biggest crises that the EU has had to endure – the Euro-zone crash, the refugee crisis, and Brexit. These crises demonstrate a fundamental weakness at the heart of the EU: it struggles with making legitimate decisions when Member States disagree about how to proceed. This book offers a guide out of this mess. It discusses how the EU can make better use of the trust between its citizens, and how it can reform itself internally so that it can actually listen to those citizens. It also offers ten original policy proposals – from the scandalously ambitious to the prosaic – to show what another Europe could look like.
Justice in the EU: The Emergence of Transnational Solidarity, Oxford Studies in European Law (OUP, 2015)
In Justice in the EU: The Emergence of Transnational Solidarity, Floris de Witte argues that European Union law can be understood as an instrument for the elaboration of what justice is, means, and requires on the level beyond the nation state. Approaching the question of justice from the European perspective, however, challenges us to think beyond the contractarian idea that equates justice with national political self-determination. A proper model of justice demands a tiered institutional and normative understanding of justice, involving both the nation state and the EU, which can make sense of the new ties between individual citizens that the process of European integration continues to generate. It also requires that we construct a theory of transnational solidarity that can explain what those new ties tell us about our transnational obligations of justice.
This book tackles three issues in turn. It explains which precise institutional and normative structures are indispensable in the pursuit of justice; how the European Union can be understood to increase our capacity for the attainment of justice; and formulates a theory of transnational solidarity that informs the interaction between national and European spheres. Three different types of transnational solidarity are identified and carefully traced throughout the case law of the Court of Justice: market solidarity, communitarian solidarity, and aspirational solidarity. Read together, these three transnational solidarities tell us exactly what justice means in the EU.