part vi • european legal integration • pia letto-vanamo laws include the principle of social force majeure in favour of the (weaker) contracting party in cases of illness, unemployment, and the like. At any rate, it was quite a Nordic – even a Finnish – approach, which later was internationally well regarded by many consumer law scholars. In the 1990s, scholars of private law became active in European cooperation. The times of so-called ‘big narratives’ were over and the key words were ‘fragmentation’ (of the legal order) on the one hand and (need for) ‘harmonization’ on the other. Wilhelmsson, who was a member of the Lando Commission, contributed to the fragmentation discussion with the bookSenmodern ansvarsrätt (‘Late Modern Law of Responsibility’).3 Its detailed consideration of the social contexts of law was again typical of Wilhelmsson. Now it was moral values which were emphasized. The term ‘late modern’ referred above all to the fragmentation of society and its basic values. The fragmentation of the law can be discerned too: the disintegration of politics into micropolitics (policies) supported by various small groups leads in that direction. According toWilhelmsson, whowas inspired byUlrich Beck, Zygmunt Bauman, and Manuel Castells, late modern law – unlike the modern law of the welfare state – develops through small stories (narratives), whereas the storytellers and their roles were traditional. One story can have several cooperating actors, such as judges, legal scholars, legislators, or civil servants. The stories are small because they usually concern only limited questions – a small story can originate in an interesting court case commented on by legal scholars – but might later be followed by new cases, leading to the generation of certain concepts or doctrines. Other stories, however, can start with legal doctrine. And the possibilities of micropolitics are best in fields where legal principles play a central role in decision-making. Although a story can begin with a single legal case, legal scholarship drives the story further, giving it a stronger normative power in developing and improving a doctrinal system with the case as a starting point. Thus, the era of the big narratives is over, but, given the small 3 Thomas Wilhelmsson, Senmodern ansvarsrätt: Privaträtt som redskap av mikropolitik (Helsinki: Kauppakaari, 2001). 278
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