Private International Law and European Society
from Marlene Tiede, a Research Fellow and PhD Candidate at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law.
Can one speak of a European society without speaking about private relations? Recent scholarship on European society has largely approached the concept through the lens of public law. Yet societies are constituted at least as much by the horizontal relations between individuals and groups as by public institutions. In the absence of a comprehensive European private law, this blogpost turns to EU private international law (PIL), the principal framework for coordinating interactions between the diverse private laws of the Member States and structuring cross-border private life within the Union. I will argue that EU PIL brings into view the importance of coordination frameworks for organising a mode of integration based not on unification, but on interdependence.