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Legal Integration: Regionalizing Judicial Authority

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Regional Organizations in International Society

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in International Relations ((PSIR))

Abstract

This chapter accounts for the different pathways of the EU and ASEAN in legal integration by examining how actors drew on existing regional norms or constructed new ones to promote or oppose legal integration. In Europe, the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 with its rules for EU citizenship marked one of the biggest leaps in integration in the organization’s history. These provisions were the culmination point of a decades-long process in which changes in primary and secondary institutions alternately catalyzed one another, driven by the discursive activism of pro-integration actors who managed to forge powerful interest coalitions and exploit tensions between regional primary institutions. Despite this dynamism, the institutionalization of European citizenship rules remained incomplete due to persistent tensions between the region’s primary institutions. In Southeast Asia, the adoption of the ASEAN Charter was a key integration milestone for the regional organization, but it also fell short of many expectations. Due to the resilience of the region’s pluralist institutional configuration, there was hardly any momentum for legal integration. While pro-integration actors pushed for reform on the grounds of economic, strategic and functional arguments, they lacked normative reference points in the region’s primary institutions to undergird their claims. By consequence, the secondary institutionalization resulting in the Charter advanced legal integration only in a limited way that was consistent with the existing normative background.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Other cases are also hard to explain with this theory, such as that of Mercosur, which has only made minor steps toward a formal judicial body since its creation in 1991 (Alter 2014, pp. 86, 374).

  2. 2.

    Legal integration thus goes beyond the notion of ‘solidarization’ in international society because solidarism is still based on like units, usually states.

  3. 3.

    See Chapter IV of the Treaty establishing the European Coal and Steel Community (1951), which almost exclusively refers to infringements by the High Authority of the EC, not by its member states.

  4. 4.

    A detailed account of the institutionalization of democratic principles in the context of EC and EU enlargement follows in Chapter 7.

  5. 5.

    Unless indicated otherwise, the memoranda referred to in this section are collected in the annex of Laursen and Vanhoonacker’s (1992) volume on the Intergovernmental Conference. For an overview of the delegations’ positions, see O’Leary (1996, pp. 23–30).

  6. 6.

    These are Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand.

  7. 7.

    The ambiguous role of liberal economic principles for regional cooperation in (Southeast) Asia is also reflected in the academic literature, where some see it as a foundational principle (Acharya 2012, pp. 161–164) while others refrain from according primary institutional status to the notion of ‘market’ (Foot 2014, p. 191).

  8. 8.

    As Naldi (2014, p. 136) observes, it is far from clear whether such a view can prevail in practice.

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  1. University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden

    Kilian Spandler

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Spandler, K. (2019). Legal Integration: Regionalizing Judicial Authority. In: Regional Organizations in International Society . Palgrave Studies in International Relations. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96896-4_5

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