Review Essay: Tuuli Wohlström’s Thesis ‘Europe Beyond the Courts. Constitutionalism, Pluralism and Integration in the Nordic Countries’

This review essay seeks to invite a wider consideration of Tuuli Wohlström’s doctoral thesis ‘Europe Beyond the Courts: Constitutionalism, Pluralism and Integration in the Nordic Countries’. Prompted by the observation that the Nordic countries have been overlooked in the EU legal pluralism discourses due to court-centric perspectives, Wohlström documents manifold conflicts with, and limits to, EU law, and argues that to understand these, it is necessary to expand the frame of reference to the broader constitutional cultures. Wohlström shows that in the Nordic countries, limits to EU law have predominantly been set by parliaments and through ex ante constitutional review mechanisms. However, she argues that EU law has brought about ‘major shifts’ in the institutional configurations, with a reluctant and vexed process of strengthening the power of courts. This culminated with the Ajos case of the Danish Supreme Court where, for the first time, a Nordic court said ‘No’ to the CJEU. The present reviewer adds broader comments from the point of view of comparative European constitutional law, and suggests that many Nordic constitutional values – especially the social welfare state – ought to be regarded as a model, rather than be replaced by neoliberalism and neofunctionalism through EU governance. The review also calls for a formal acknowledgement of structural problems in EU research, and puts forward a policy proposal to support the international publication of doctoral theses on national and comparative European constitutional law.