“[T]he researcher is compelled not to choose one level of analysis over the others … but rather to pay special attention to what lies precisely in-between them” (p. 10; emphasis original here and throughout the review). So begins Antoine Vauchez’s Brokering Europe. As for the researcher, so for the reader, for this is a book that challenges the reader on multiple levels, moving between them in allusive, enriching, and ultimately frustrating ways.

At one level of analysis, this is a book about “the manner in which ‘Europe’ has initially come to be defined in legal terms … and how this particular path was actually chosen” (p. 4). Rather than taking Europe’s legal character for granted, or ascribing its legal character to some other black box behind it (e.g., an “economy or logic”; p. 5), the author explains Europe’s constitution through law as “the contingent and conflictual historical process of symbolic, cognitive, and practical unification” or the process of uniting laws and peoples into “one single order” (p. 5). The key explanatory variables are, for Vauchez, “EU law’s historically acquired ‘brokering capacity’” (p. 6)—or how it holds a “complex, disjointed, and multilevel polity” together—and, linked to this, its emergence as a “weak [transnational] field” (p. 9).

Rather than explain what these two variables are, Vauchez shows them at work, making the well-established Bourdieusian move of uncovering the brute fact of social relations, meaning making, and interests at play in constituting this field and its boundaries. Much effort goes into showing (albeit not explaining) the boundaries of the weak field. In the context of European Union law, he makes a serious methodological innovation when choosing to examine “Euro-lawyers” (people implicated in talking and doing things legally in a European context), meaning everyone from diplomats to corporate lawyers. He uses a wide range of sources to bring this field to life: “biographical data, in-depth coverage of European law, scholarly or professional conferences, ECJ [European Court of Justice] cases’ documents and commentaries, forgotten doctrinal controversies, interviews with key legal practitioners [notably, these are not primary interviews], archival files” and so on (p. 10). He does so with an ease that belies the difficulty of his task; his rigor makes us happy to be pulled along from a micro description of personal relationships between a handful of lawyers to a diachronic legal analysis of the impact of the van Gend en Loos decision on EU jurisprudence as a whole. In doing so, he shows us the ways in which the micropolitics (and, in an extraordinary few pages, a micro-aesthetics; pp. 210–15) of a transnational legal field have privileged jurisprudence, the acquis communautaire, and constitutionalism as the languages through which the European project can be expressed.

On another level, however, this book is concerned with the mystery of global governance. As his opening pages suggest, Vauchez seeks to exemplify a particular set of methodological commitments; while his site of inquiry is the European Union, the concerns to which these commitments respond are unmistakably global. Sitting squarely behind his methodological and analytical moves is a sense of disquiet with how the academy depicts and grapples with the operations of transnational and global power. The prevailing scholarship emerging from law and political science ”fails to grasp the fine-grained processes through which law and Europe have historically built (and rebuilt) each other in a continuous and perpetually reinforcing entwinement” (p. 10). For Vauchez, the academy’s insistence on describing the surface phenomena of global governance—the “front stage” where it is enacted in institutions, regimes, norms, taken-for-granted actors—is missing the point. He believes that we must grapple with how and why the performance comes to be authoritative; he seeks to pull aside the curtain and show us the backstage, the hidden work that produces the play. And for him, that curtain is legal: Law codifies global contests over power into a series of taken-for-granteds.

Vauchez is not alone. The last two decades have seen a proliferation of demystification projects dealing with global and transnational law. He allies himself with the Bourdieusian oeuvre of Yves Dezalay and Bryant Garth, which seeks to reveal the hidden operations of law in fields ranging from rule of law reform (The Internationalization of Palace Wars, 2002) to commercial arbitration (Dealing in Virtue, 1996). Others have ranged topically from public international law to trade law to banking law; they have spanned disciplines and political perspectives, from Bourdieusian historical sociology to anthropologists of expertise, and from dabbling critical legal students to doyens of science and technology studies.

Brokering Europe, then, is in good and well-trodden company. And paying attention to what “lies precisely in-between” the levels of European analysis and global demystification reveals two opportunities that have perhaps been missed. The first is the conversation between national and global legal mystification: how do these two types of mystification relate to produce a legalized regime that functions across scales? This is frequently absent from other demystification projects, which operate at a global level (albeit an embryonic theme in Dezalay and Garth’s work). At first blush, the European Union, a syncretic product of national legal faith systems, appears to be an ideal site for such an exploration. Vauchez suggests that he will take on this task by excavating EU law’s “brokering capacity” (p. 6). In the end, however, the links between brokering and national legal mystery remain asserted, their content allusive: We are told and not shown, for example, that Euro-lawyers move easily between national and European levels because “sophisticated casuistry” is a “trait … of professional duty, if not honor” across the board (p. 113). The second missed opportunity is an exploration of the unique characteristics of law such that it “functions de facto as a facilitator” (p. 102) of political projects to “consolidate a certain vision of Europe” (p. 16).

By the end of the book, Vauchez concludes that legal constructs are “Europe’s ‘boundary objects’ [citation omitted], sufficiently malleable … to circulate [while sufficiently] coherent to preserve a relatively stable set of meanings” across Europe (p. 230). In other words, as Bourdieusians of many stripes have pointed out, legal texts are interesting inasmuch as they frequently circulate without their contexts. Given that this notion is broadly accepted, it would have been helpful to introduce it earlier, and then to explore the qualities of law in Europe that make it so, as demystification projects are now wont to do—from Martti Koskenniemi’s structures of legal argument in From Apology to Utopia (2005), to Annelise Riles’s nature of legal techniques in Collateral Knowledge (2011), to Samuel Moyn’s depoliticized utopianism in The Last Utopia (2010).

Of course, these are mere quibbles with a hugely insightful analysis of the EU and an excellent exemplar of a particular sociologizing genre of global governance expertise. It is a testament to the quality of Vauchez’s material and analysis—and perhaps the ambition of his claims—that there is a lingering sense of an opportunity missed.