This essay explores what can be learned from understanding EU law as a language in the literary sense of being a set of resources for manifold ethical and political expression and social action. As a contribution to new methodological approaches to studying EU law, it will propose a method highlighting how EU law can be studied in such a way by paying attention to the various linguistic and structural features of a legal text while, at the same time, diversifying the rationales through which we understand and make sense of such textual features. The Sayn–Wittgenstein decision will serve as point of reference in order to illustrate the value-added of this new theoretical and methodological insight to understanding EU law. This essay will conclude that it is not only worth taking the language of EU law seriously because it allows us to ’see’ more in the law, but also because it enables us to elevate the deeper ideas about Europe to the surface of the language we use when writing and speaking about EU law and to thereby contribute to a more productive dialogue about the foundations and future of the EU polity.

What can the cultural study of law tell us about the European Union (EU)? How can we study the European political imagination? This paper demonstrates that the European political imagination is both composite and multifaceted. It is structured not merely by EU law but also by the constitutional orders of the EU Member States. A cultural analysis of European law must therefore include the constitutional worldviews of the Member States. In the political imagination of most of the Member States, “Europe” plays an important symbolic role. Yet since the Member States are shaped by different ‘varieties of constitutionalism’, the meaning ascribed to “Europe” is not uniform. The study of the constitutional worldviews of the Member States, however, should not come at the expense of studying the European political imagination sustained by EU institutions. This political imagination is currently undergoing a transformation. EU authority is increasingly legitimized by appealing to the “the people of Europe” and there are calls for “European sovereignty.” This emerging European political imagination transcends the dominant view of the literature where Europe is understood as a space of “post-sovereignty.”

In the context of growing anxieties regarding the place and role of law in the future of the Europe Union (EU), this article reflects upon the extent to which Paul Kahn’s cultural study of law’s rule could be relevant for the place and role of EU law in these respects. Drawing upon Kahn’s monograph Making the Case: The Art of the Judicial Opinion, this article analyses the Laval judgment for these purposes, as one of the most controversial cases ever decided by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). On this basis, the article shows how the cultural analysis of law advanced by Kahn can help us to sharpen our sensibilities with regard to the deeper layers of moral and political meaning that EU law expounds and to thereby enable us to expand our horizons as well as conversations on the socio-political and economic composition of EU law. Yet this article also raises skepticism about the cultural study of EU law’s rule. Given the diverse cultural idiosyncrasies and traditions by which citizens of EU Member States live, it questions whether EU law can be assessed from the point of view of a collective identity believed to best persuade EU citizens of the authority of EU law.