Tradycja przed Trybunałem – o szczególnym aspekcie członkostwa Szwecji w Unii Europejskiej
Tradition in Negotiations, Tradition before the Court – on a Specific Aspect of Sweden’s Membership in the European Union

Summary/Abstract: This article examines the functioning of specific legal solutions and elements of the Nordic legal tradition in the context of Sweden’s membership in the European Union. At a purely regulatory level, we recognize Sweden’s specific legal and political solutions, which were negotiated with the European Communities during the pre-accession phase, and on which various compromises were reached, ultimately facilitating acceptance of accession by Swedish society (albeit only by a narrow majority of 52.27%). However, Nordic specificity also manifests itself at the much more elusive level of legal culture and tradition, best exemplified by the 2002 CJEU judgment in Case C-478/99, concerning the correctness of Sweden’s implementation of Directive 93/13/EEC. The very existence of this dispute reflects a misunderstanding between representatives of different legal traditions regarding what legislation should look like and what types of texts should be considered sources of law. The text discusses briefly the political background of Sweden’s accession to the EU, some of the contentious issues that arose during the accession negotiations (e.g., the state alcohol monopoly or the use of chewing tobacco), and finally, the implementation of Community directives into Swedish law, culminating in the judgment in Case C-478/99, where the essence of the issue was the approach to preparatory materials created during the legislative process, whose role in the application of law is far more important in the Nordic countries than anywhere else in Europe. In conclusion, it was pointed out that the discussed case is one of the pieces of evidence supporting the thesis about the relatively low awareness of the specificity of Nordic law outside Scandinavia itself, and at the same time that the differences in legal regulations are easily noticeable, unlike much more subtle issues in the field of culture and legal tradition, which can “reveal” quite unexpectedly.

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