The « long march » of the private law of the European Union towards harmonization has arrived at a crucial step, namely the search for coherence of terms. The production of a « common frame of reference » requires that we reconsider the national understandings of EU law.
In the past, the task of giving « content » to a language of law belonged to various oscial actors : today, it is principally the legal scholars who are asked to determine the meaning of the common concepts. In order to do this, they must have a precise methodology, which is not uniquely concentrated on norms, and which is independent of the method of telelolgy and functionalism applied by the ECJ. In order to contribute to the ocnsolidaiton of a common legal culture, this method must support a reading of legal texts outside of tjeir contents, which looks for the constituent concepts and permits that a coherent legal reasoning is developed between the Community level and the national levels. Going from the first level, the analysis should lead to a comparison with the system of specific concepts to the national legal systems, a comparison
which is made by way of a vast description of different usages and legal terms representing the concepts. This approach is based on the recognition of the principle under which language is a strongly creative element of law and, in the unique milieu of the European Union, there exist multiple communities of interpretation which communicate in a non-hierarchical manner. Moreover, Community law imposes mandatory connections between the level of the Union and those of the States; this leads to a circulation of rules among which language creates possible solutions, independently of local affirmations. Finding these solutions by reviewing the definitions of terms made by the legal and interpretative formants can facilitate the recomposition of the incoherence and the destructive tension of a European private law oriented towards harmonization, but which remains the hostage of pluralistic tendencies marked by multilingualism.