Identifying Member States’ Interests

Abstract

This chapter embeds the study’s first empirical step. By reviewing national governments’ interest-articulation during the drafting of EU family reunification provisions, the chapter maps Member States’ political preferences in this area of law. For these purposes, the drafting of family reunification clauses in both EU free movement law as well as in EU immigration law is considered. This first analysis provides an ex ante benchmark of dominant political preferences against which to assess, in the two subsequent stages, whether and how the Court was able to develop judicially autonomous decisions, that is, decisions that are independent from the identified preferences. By means of this ex ante benchmark, the analysis also seeks to gain leverage on the problem of observational equivalence that has hindered prior judicial politics’ analyses.