projects of Europe’s political and economic elites. The critics are correct to some extent. Policy makers have paid astonishingly little attention to real cultural differences between the North and the South as well as to the frustrations and scepticism registered in almost every public opinion poll in countries like Great Britain, Denmark and Sweden. There seems to be a disagreement in attitudes between northerners and southerners that in its turn perhaps reflects a more profound disagreement in values: the Protestant North against the Catholic South, the post-modern value systems against more traditional ones? Does such disagreement in values also reflect a disagreement in attitudes to the law and institutions of the Union in particular? I think this is likely. Comprehensive questions of legal culture usually involve much more than technical aspects of the law. If we ask lawyers and legal historians whether or not there is or has been a common legal culture of Europe, they will most likely answer that Europeans share a common legal past at least until the rise of the nation states. On the other hand, if we ask sociologists, for instance, the same question we may not receive the same answer. In his paper on European legal history and European integration, Dr Heinz Mohnhaupt has asked for stronger interdisciplinary perspectives. I think he is right in doing so. Legal historians have too often addressed questions of law as primarily technical problems and too little asked for the social and economic context of the law, what Dr Mohnhaupt has referred to as law's cultural basis, its kulturelle Bedingungen. Interpreting legal culture relates legal facts to the society where the law is used and practised by real people, and obviously legal history and comparative law have much to gain from using social science data and techniques. In this paper I tentatively address Dr Monhaupt's proposal by using the World Value Survey data to mould the kulturelle Bedingungen of the law. Of course, such an attempt to insert sociological values into 112
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