Koutrakos, Panos; Snell, Jukka --- "Internal market: an introduction" [2017] ELECD 264; in Koutrakos, Panos; Snell, Jukka (eds), "Research Handbook on the Law of the EU’s Internal Market" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2017) 1

Book Title: Research Handbook on the Law of the EU’s Internal Market

Editor(s): Koutrakos, Panos; Snell, Jukka

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781783478095

Section: Chapter 1

Section Title: Internal market: an introduction

Author(s): Koutrakos, Panos; Snell, Jukka

Number of pages: 10

Abstract/Description:

The internal market has been at the heart of the European integration project from the very beginning. The Treaty of Rome was built around a common market. The revival of integration in the 1980s focused on creating a single market. Many of the fundamental principles of European law have been based on and shaped by the needs of the internal market. For example, in Van Gend the Court of Justice reasoned that ‘[t]he objective of the EEC Treaty, which is to establish a Common Market, … implies that this Treaty is more than an agreement which merely creates mutual obligations between the contracting States’, and used this to ground the principle of direct effect. In Costa v ENEL the Court proceeded to hold that the principle of primacy was needed to ensure that the objective of the Treaty, the common market, was not undermined by conflicting national laws. The profound legal, political, and policy pressures on the internal market make the focus of this book on the project as a whole timely.