Embedded Law. Political Sociology of the European Community of Law: Elements of a Renewed Research Agenda

European law; European court of justice; political science; legitimacy

Too Embedded to Fail: the ECB and the Necessity of Calculating Europe

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

The international way of expertise : the first World Court and the genesis of transnational expert fields

The article argues that “international expertise” is not just a mere continuation of national forms of expertise “at the international level”, but has a distinct social and professional pattern (defined as constitutive of a ‘weak expert fields’), one that needs to be considered in order to account for the definitional power of experts in global governance. The paper tracks the genesis of this specificity in the case of international legal expertise, arguably the template against which other forms of expertise have historically built their own professional projects. Getting back to the immediate post-WWI period and the League of Nations as the inaugural scene for the power-knowledge nexus at the international level, the paper analyses the drafting of the first World Court in 1920 as a critical formative moment for the definition of the “international expert”. While drafters agreed on the creation of the first permanent and professional court, they simultaneously renounced to define who the permanent professionals of that court would have to be, therefore depriving international law of any strong supranational governance unit. The paper argues that this initial uncoupling between the autonomy (of the court) and the heteronomy (of the international lawyer) has shaped the enduring “weak” structure of transnational expert fields