European Integration
GAICIL Insights
This entry treats European integration as a process of institutionalization, through incremental change or sweeping reform, that continuously transforms the European Union’s institutional framework.
Seeing the EU as a moving process rather than a fixed structure helps explain how it builds new regulatory regimes, from competition rules to digital and AI legislation.
Abstract
European integration is a process. It is a process of institutionalization by which the old continent is continuously transformed either through incremental changes or through across-the-board reforms. European integration designates the changing current institutional framework of the European Union (hereafter EU). The European continent experiences other institutional integration than the EU’s – mostly the European Convention on Human Rights – but the focus shall be put on the EU as this regional organization is the most significant and integrated one.1
Takeaway
“European integration is a process.”
Quoted verbatim from the author’s abstract.
Notes
- Aurelien Portuese, European Integration, in Encyclopedia of Law and Economics 954 (Alain Marciano & Giovanni Battista Ramello eds., Springer 2025), https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-76422-6_54. Definition quoted verbatim from the publisher’s page, https://link.springer.com/rwe/10.1007/978-3-031-76422-6_54. ↩
Cite as: Aurelien Portuese, European Integration, in Encyclopedia of Law and Economics 954 (Alain Marciano & Giovanni Battista Ramello eds., Springer 2025), https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-76422-6_54
Header image: European Parliament Strasbourg Hemicycle - Diliff.jpg by Diliff, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
