The EU is committed to the construction of an internal market: this book examines what the concept of the ‘internal market’ means. The book’s account and analysis of the law is built on the claim that the EU ‘internal market’ is an ambiguous legal concept. One may readily suppose that the UK possesses an internal market. So does Germany, so does France, so does Australia and Canada and the USA, and so on. And the EU aspires to an internal market. But the detailed patterns governing these several internal markets are not uniform. They vary. They vary according to the extent to which the constit ... More

The EU is committed to the construction of an internal market: this book examines what the concept of the ‘internal market’ means. The book’s account and analysis of the law is built on the claim that the EU ‘internal market’ is an ambiguous legal concept. One may readily suppose that the UK possesses an internal market. So does Germany, so does France, so does Australia and Canada and the USA, and so on. And the EU aspires to an internal market. But the detailed patterns governing these several internal markets are not uniform. They vary. They vary according to the extent to which the constituent units are permitted to pursue different regulatory policies. They vary according to the scope of lawmaking competence and powers allocated to the central authority. They vary too according to the governing institutional (judicial and political) arrangements. The quality and intensity of the regulated environment varies according to the choices made. There is a broad band of possible internal markets, ranging from one which is radically decentralized as a result of a choice in favour of unrestricted inter-jurisdictional competition to, at the other extreme, one which is radically centralized in the sense that lawmaking competence has been completely stripped away from the constituent units in favour of the central authority. Within that spectrum there is a huge range of options. This book examines and explains the choices made by the EU, and shows what they entail for the shape of the EU’s internal market.