What such inquiries would highlight is the sophisticated process through which EU integration takes place. Its law and its space are, in this view, so closely intertwined that studying them in isolation from each other will necessarily lead to an incomplete picture. The transformative potential that conceptual studies in EU legal geography could unearth draws on two characteristics of EU law. On the one hand, EU law is relatively malleable. Given that its legal norms apply across the EU, to close to 500 million inhabitants with a great variety of cultural, geographical, social, climatological and economic characteristics, EU law is always somehow ‘localised’, or locally mediated. On the other hand, EU law scholarship has long focused on the transformative potential of EU law: it operates in relative isolation from political actors, its normative core sees to the evaporation of strong boundaries and identities rather than their creation, and it is almost entirely reliant on the creation of (individual) rights for its authority. This combination, arguably, means that what EU law ‘does’ is deeply spatial, in its ability to transform (or create) new types of relationships, new types of boundaries and new types of identities.
5. Conclusion
Legal geography is an exciting and rapidly developing discipline. Somehow, it is also one that has passed EU legal studies by. The questions legal geography asks, and the way it looks at the world, however, seem an ideal fit for the EU. The preoccupation of legal geography with the relationship between space, time and law offers, in the context of the EU, a range of interesting questions that pertain to the very nature of the process of integration, the role of law in that process and the ability of local context to mediate the strictures of EU law. The reflexive sensibility of legal geography, whereby law is understood to create spaces and engender new relationships but the causal arrow is also reversed, in the sense that existing tangible or intangible spaces are understood to impact on the way in which law is formed, articulated or applied, lies at the core of the current predicament of the EU.
Understanding the interaction between ‘Brussels’ and ourselves, our streets, our relationships and our social, cultural or ecological environment is where the next frontier of EU law is. Happy travels!
Cite this article: de Witte F (2022). Here be Dragons: Legal geography and EU law. European Law Open 1, 113–125. https://doi.org/10.1017/elo.2021.2
