Contents

Summary

The lesson to be securely drawn is that notwithstanding the untroubled pursuance of domestic practice, we are getting closer to a crossroads. The perspective of the common codification of private law within the European Union not only brings back (breaking through walls of silence of several centuries) memories of accomplishments and expectations of a long and distant past (once made universally valid in continental dimensions) as actual experience, but, at the same time, also refers us back to those points and moments (regarded for centuries as buried by the bygone past) from which-upon the basis of the joint acquisition of the shared Greek-Roman heritage and its differentiating (yet in a way somehow united) readaptation - the paths of development characteristic of the Civil Law and the Common Law had started once to diverge.

The more the advancement of the European unification progresses, the more inverse the assessment of European codification becomes, reconsidering past trends, values and regulatory techniques. Thus, it is suggested as if we, on the Continent, had not so much become state-organised national units unified by a sequence of national laws but, being too conceited of our most promising collective heritage within the transitory phase of an infantile disorder, became rather fragmented in national isolation from one another. The meaning conveyed by our past and the paths actually covered have thereby become dubious again with open-ending alternatives.

The problem of codification in Europe seemed to be more or less settled for ever a few decades ago. Now, in the light of the new challenges that are coming from the facts of the newest European convergence, we have to resume not only our earlier investigations but, at the same time, also repeatedly reconsider the foundations and the historical (that is, as directed from the past towards the future, perspectivical) presuppositions of our thinking-perhaps not for the last time in our ever-changing world.