The creation of the European Economic Community (EEC), Euratom (EAEC), and Coal and Steel Community (ECSC)1 has provided a new framework and impetus for the harmonization of laws in Western Europe. Although, at the end of the nineteenth century, even before the process of breaking up the civil law as the ius commune of Europe2 was completed, there were efforts, for its reunification, progress has been slow.3 The deep-rooted reason was probably best appraised by R. Sohm already at the first Congres International de Droit Compare' in Paris in 1900, when he pointed out that the idea of a national state necessarily involves the concept of a national law.4 Quite naturally, as long as unification endeavors avoided the basic issue underlying the diversity of laws, viz. the exclusive territorial sovereignty of the national state (as a legal order), harmonization of laws was inevitably restricted to a limited number of ad hoc experiments chiefly in the sphere of commercial law.5 Moreover, as the application and interpretation of the unified laws was left to national organs, ad hoc unification, though temporarily successful, was succeeded by a de'sagre'gation6 originating in the renewed diversity of municipal laws and judicial decisions.