Abstract

The mission formulated in Article 164 EEC for the task to be performed by the ECJ has the terseness of a military assignment. Indeed, it does give the sense of a calling to act as a guardian of the constitution of a new, broad-based and durable form of integration, based on a common market and close economic co-operation between Western European States, which just a few years before had fought each other in a devastating continental war. Part of the backdrop to this was the earlier failures in the 1950s to finalise the attempted Treaties on Defence and the European Political Union.