The Foundations of EU Administrative Law as a Scholarly Field: Functional Comparison, Normativism and Integration

The functional comparison of administrative laws enabled judges and scholars to establish and develop EU administrative law based on a state-matrix of general principles. They mobilised functional comparison to build a law and a polity and to ground a scholarly field. A meta-analysis of the work of Jürgen Schwarze examines the choices of object, objectives and method that grounded one prevailing way of approaching EU administrative law, as well as the respective assumptions and normative implications. Through comparison, the logic of protecting the private legal sphere from unilateral exercises of authority provided the conceptual framework for EU administrative law. But it largely ignored structural features of the EU administration (public-private collaboration and interpenetration between state and EU administrations), ill-fitting with the binary liberty-authority that grounded core principles of national administrative law. It ignored also the specificities of the functional polity in which it was inserted. EU administrative law remains imbued with this original liberal normativist approach, constructed by judges and scholars, who in different guises, contributed to fashioning the state-like characteristics of the EU. This legacy of comparative administrative law should be critically examined, 30 years later, at a very different stage of EU integration