Proposals from the European Commission to work towards greater harmonisation of contract law, and indeed private law more generally, have been described in terms that apparently distance these plans from the introduction of a code civil europa. Nevertheless, the programme for developing ‘non-sector-specific measures’ into a ‘common frame of reference’ constitutes in its fundamentals and aspirations the ambition to create a European law of contract. And the method for the construction of this code replicates the process devising the great European codes of the nineteenth century: a painstaking scholarly endeavour to find consistency and coherence in the divergent national private law systems, except that no legislative process is foreseen.
The Constitution of a Common Frame of Reference for European Contract Law
