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The textual layers of European contract law

The article traces the historical stages and main milestones of the process of harmonization and attempts to unify European contract law. Its first stage lasted from 1980 to 2015, marked by the appearance of many texts of a generalizing nature, designed to become the basis for the development of uniform contract law in the EU, and smoothly flowed into one another forming various conceptual layers of the emerging general contract law of Europe. The author identifies 10 different layers of the main text prepared by various Commissions and Working Groups in the corpus of texts accumulated during the process of developing model rules of European contract law. Taking into account the different versions of these texts, there are also 18 textual layers, to which 13 important EU directives and at least 6 international conventions or draft conventions concerning the general part of contract law and the law of sale of goods or certain aspects of these areas should be added. It is also noted that there are competing national projects that are marginal in relation to the European mainstream, which should also be taken into account. Political and other reasons for the failure of certain drafts are explained. Their advantages, defects and features are considered. In the process of describing the history of the rise and fall of the idea of uniform contract law in Europe at the recently completed first stage of its implementation, the author analyzes the reasons for the failure of this process and in conclusion provides a brief description of the international research project in which he was a participant. This project led to the publication in the summer of 2018 of comprehensive “Commentaries on European Contract Laws”, which can give a “second wind” to the trends of harmonization of contract law in the EU and beyond.