Read the text below and build up five questions to it:

NATIONAL IDENTITY, LAW AND EUROPEAN INTEGRATION

European integration is commonly thought of as a politic and economical project, but the making
of Europe is to a considerable degree obtained through law. It is a well-known fact that The EU
consists of political institutions that are furnished with the capacity of passing laws with validity
throughout the member states. Some may also be aware of the fact that the sole competence of
interpreting those laws lies with the European Court of Justice, which has actively contributed to
further European integration in periods when the political institutions of the EU and the
governments of the member states were reluctant to do so. What may be less well-known are the
integrative forces resulting from the European Convention on Human Rights signed, ratified and
incorporated by most European countries and driven ahead by the dynamic jurisprudence of the
European Court of Human Rights.

In sum, these processes of European legal integration involve considerable changes to the
national legal systems in Europe. National parliaments and national law courts must accept that
law is increasingly made and developed outside their realm, in the centres of Europe in Brussels,
Luxembourg, Strasbourg and that European law is increasingly supersending national law, even
within the confines of the nation state. Hence, the topic of legal integration and the reaction of
national lawyers is an interesting focus on the meeting and possible conflict of the European and
the national levels of society and the relationship between European and national identity.

When studying the relationship between law and national identity, the metaphor of ‘legal
transplants’ commonly applied by experts on comparative law to describe ‘foreign’ legal rules
adopted by domestic law, is revealing. National legal rules are seen as ‘a body of laws’, as it is
sometimes actually called, and legal rules and concepts stemming from a foreign legal system – a
foreign body of laws – cannot be easily be ‘transplanted’ into the national legal’ body’ The ‘legal
transplant’ will hardly ever interact successfully with other elements in the ‘legal organism’: the
most likely reaction will be one of ‘irritation’, perhaps even rejection’.

The image of national law as a living body is no new invention – it dates back to the natural law
thinking of the Enlightenment and penetrated romantic discourse in Europe of the nineteenth
century. Great influence emanated from the legal thinking of the French philosopher
Montesquieu who in his classic book De l’Esprit des Lois (On the Spirit of Law) from 1748
introduced the notion ‘the spirit of the law’, i.e. the dependency of law on the physical, cultural
and political factors characteristic of a country and its people.

(…………………………………………………………………………………………………….)
In recent years, the ideas of the nineteenth century legal philosophy has been applied by the
comparative lawyer Pierre Legrand in his critique of the political and scientific endeavour to
harmonize the national political systems of Europe. (……………………………)

As argued by Jacobson(2002), ideas about the relationship between law and national identity
seem to have played a major part in the making of the modern nation states. In the nationalistic
discourse of the nineteenth century Europe the conception of national spirits of law was helpful
in the construction and invention of the nation state, just like notions of national languages,
cultures, traditions and history. Thus, it is no coincidence that at that time many European
nations were equipped with constitutions, defining the fundamental principles of law and
government of the nation state. Even today, the constitution of a state is sometimes highlighted
as a national symbol on par with the Crown, the currency and the flag. In the consciousness of
people, the laws and legal institutions of their country play a fundamental and significant part in
their identification with the nation. (………………………………………………………..).