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International audience ; The article offers a critical overview of American political science literature on the European Court of Justice, and particularly on its democratic poltential. ; L'article propose une critique de la littérature américaine sur la Cour de justice des communautés européennes, singulièrement quant au potentiel démocratique que recèlerait son développement.

International audience ; The article offers a critical overview of American political science literature on the European Court of Justice, and particularly on its democratic poltential. ; L'article propose une critique de la littérature américaine sur la Cour de justice des communautés européennes, singulièrement quant au potentiel démocratique que recèlerait son développement.

This article tracks the genesis of one of the EU's most established meta-narratives, that of Europeanization-through-case-law. Instead of studying this theory of European integration as an explanatory frame, I consider it here as the phenomenon to be explained and accounted for. Thereby, the paper does not try to assess how heuristic and explicative it may be, but rather analyzes what is at stake in its genesis as a dominant theory of Europeanization. I trace its emergence in the conflicting theorizations of the relationship between Law and the European Communities that come along with the European Court of Justice's 'landmark' decisions (Van Gend en Loos and Costa v. ENEL). This approach helps seizing the genesis of a specific and - at the time - rather unlikely political model for Europe in which a judge (the ECJ) is regarded as the very locus of European integration's dynamics as well as the best mediator and moderator of both Member States' "conservatism" and individuals' "potential excesses". It also allows to grasp the emergence of Euro-implicated lawyers as a group endowed with a set of critical functions (integration) and missions (protecting the EC treaties) the theory assigned them.

Rather than considering legal and judicial arenas as the mere surface of the heavy social processes that shape European integration, this article contends that they are actually one the essential spaces where the government of Europe is being produced. To account for this paramount role played by law in EU polity, two rather unexplored research paths are undertaken. First of all, a socio-historical perspective focuses on the critical junctures in which case-law and judicial governance have been formalized as the locus of European integration and as the most legitimate model for EU government. Second, a more sociological look is taken at the functioning of the "European legal field". It shows the intense circulation of Euro-lawyers in-between the various (national or supranational) academic, bureaucratic, political and economic poles that make up Europe. Thereby located at the crossroads of European elites and sectors, the European legal field occupies a critical position in a EU polity deprived of a State organizing in a perennial way the mediation between social interests.

Looking back at eight years of controversies over Europe's future, this paper develops a new research agenda towards a political sociology of EU constitutional politics. As a preliminary step, we make the case for reflexivity, that is, for a critical appraisal of intellectual practice in the constitutional debate. Two research directions are then explored: an analysis of the changing forms of the "European public sphere"; a study of the "field of EU constitutional reform". As a polity, Europe is not a social continuum, but a mosaic of fragmented public spheres and social fields that, albeit undoubtedly interdependent, are largely autonomous from one another. In this configuration, informal scenes of power are as much important as institutional centres of command to set the agenda, promote new ideas and mediate contending interests. We therefore argue that a better understanding of both the European public sphere and the field of EU constitutional reform implies moving the research agenda from analyzing institutions to studying informal cross-sectorial arenas and trans-national networks, as well as the social and professional profiles of the agents making up these institutions, arenas and networks.

Calling into question the meaning of "independence" in contemporary central banking, the present article investigates the social origins and post-crisis persistence of the European Central Bank's (ECB) core macroeconomic model, despite broad acknowledgement of its failure to anticipate the financial crisis. We trace the making of the model; the process by which it became dominant in European central banking and beyond; criticism in the wake of its failure to predict the financial-cum-Eurozone crisis; and its persistence, nonetheless, in the crisis' aftermath. We argue that the formation, meanings, and persistence of the ECB's model cannot be understood as effects of the bank's independence or the model's intrinsic qualities. Rather, the model's trajectory is best understood in light of the ECB's transnationally embedded social location in international finance, professional economics, and European governing institutions. The necessity of calculating Europe, irrespective of the accuracy or predictive strength of the model being used, has less to do with the ECB's independence from domestic politics and more to do with its transnational embeddedness – or, stated differently, that the ECB is, in a sense, too embedded to fail.

Calling into question the meaning of "independence" in contemporary central banking, the present article investigates the social origins and post-crisis persistence of the European Central Bank's (ECB) core macroeconomic model, despite broad acknowledgement of its failure to anticipate the financial crisis. We trace the making of the model; the process by which it became dominant in European central banking and beyond; criticism in the wake of its failure to predict the financial-cum-Eurozone crisis; and its persistence, nonetheless, in the crisis' aftermath. We argue that the formation, meanings, and persistence of the ECB's model cannot be understood as effects of the bank's independence or the model's intrinsic qualities. Rather, the model's trajectory is best understood in light of the ECB's transnationally embedded social location in international finance, professional economics, and European governing institutions. The necessity of calculating Europe, irrespective of the accuracy or predictive strength of the model being used, has less to do with the ECB's independence from domestic politics and more to do with its transnational embeddedness - or, stated differently, that the ECB is, in a sense, too embedded to fail.

"Mainstream legal scholarship on the European Community (EC) and the European Union (EU) has long been dominated by meta-narratives and grand theories to explain European legal integration as a necessary, if not self-evident, process toward ever greater integration. The directional pull of these functional narratives, whether termed as Europeanization, federalization, or constitutionalization, is one towards an ever-closer Union, thereby replicating the original teleology of the Rome Treaty (1957). Although there are theoretical differences among these explanations, notably between intergovernmental and neo-functionalist narratives, most scholars agree that one particular institutional actor has played an outsized role: the European Court of Justice (ECJ), now the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) since the Lisbon Treaty (2009) that includes the Court of Justice, the General Court. For the same reasons, the CJEU has become a coveted object of inquiry for studies of European integration and governance. We have for years learned about its role in constitutionalizing Europe, establishing the supremacy of European law, creating a system of supranational governance, and the new types of litigation and mobilization spurred by the ECJ"--