Europarecht und das Politische

European citizens remain largely indifferent towards the Union. Legal scholars are wrong to funnel the Union's social legitimacy deficit to empirical sociology, or to ignore it altogether, because questions of identity are intimately linked to the law. Engaging in a cultural study of European law, Ulrich Haltern argues that the crisis in social acceptance can be traced back to the texture of EU law. While national law has a rich fabric of cultural resources to rely on, EU law appears less »ours«. The way these two bodies of law imagine the political is entirely different, as can be shown with respect to the free movement of goods, the judicial system, fundamental rights, and Union citizenship. As it turns out, the European Court is following the Commission's lead and is taking the Union from a political psychology of interest and reason to a dimension of collective will, thus approximating the imagination of the political in the EU and in nation-states.