From an Unpaid Electricity Bill to the Primacy of EU Law: Gian Galeazzo Stendardi and the Making of Costa v. ENEL

Whilst Costa v. ENEL is the starting point for most accounts of the primacy of EU law, the story of that lawsuit is still relatively unknown. What drove Flaminio Costa to sue his electricity provider over a bill of as little as £1,925 (about €22 in 2019)? Why did the small-claims court of Milan decide to involve both the Italian Constitutional Court and the European Court of Justice in such a ‘petty’ lawsuit? Why did those two courts hand down rulings going in opposite directions? How did the lawsuit end when it came back to the Milan small-claims court? Relying upon previously undisclosed court documents and interviews with some of the actors involved, this article seeks to shed some light on the less-known aspects of the Costa v. ENEL lawsuit, against the background of electricity nationalization in Italy at the height of the Cold War, and to assess the contribution of that lawsuit and of its ‘architect’, Gian Galeazzo Stendardi, to the development of the doctrine of primacy of European Union law.


Setting the Scene: The Nationalization of Electricity in Italy
The nationalization of electricity production and distribution was 'possibly the most far-reaching political initiative in Italy since the end of World War II'. 1 By all accounts, it was the quid pro quo that the left-wing Italian Socialist Party demanded in return for its external support to the centrist Cabinet chaired by the Christian Democrat Amintore Fanfani in 1962-1963, 2 which paved the way to a centre-left alliance that would dominate the Italian political landscape for several years. 3 This political alliance played a key role at the height of the Cold War, as it enabled the Christian Democrats to remain in power in spite of declining electoral support 4 and to consolidate Italy's pro-American foreign policy. The crowning of that policy was the establishment of several US nuclear missile sites in Southern Italy, 5 which gave Italy a relevant place in the geopolitical landscape despite its lack of an indigenous atomic weapons programme. 6 At the beginning of the 1960s, when the Italian 'economic miracle' was in full swing, 7 electricity production and distribution in Italy was a profitable oligopoly in the hands of two public and six private corporate groups (the so-called 'electric barons'), 8 each operating as a de facto monopolist over a part of the national territory. 9 This gave rise to significant price differences between northern and southern Italy, which prompted the introduction of nation-wide electricity tariffs in August 1961. 10 However, the Fanfani Cabinet claimed that government regulation alone could not ensure that Italy's electricity production would keep up with the expansion of demand, 11 which was expected to double every 10 years as per Ailleret's law. 12 2 See Mori, 'La nazionalizzazione in Italia: il dibattito politico ed economico', in P. Baldini and P. Hertner (eds), La nazionalizzazione dell'energia elettrica: L'esperienza italiana e di altri paesi europei (1989) 91. 3 See G. Tamburrano, Storia e cronaca del centro-sinistra (1990); Y. Voulgaris, L'Italia del centro-sinistra: 1960-1968 (1998). The Fanfani Cabinet thus submitted a bill to introduce a centralized management of electricity production and distribution, 13 which would enable the implementation of a comprehensive capacity expansion policy as well as the full exploitation of existing interconnection opportunities and economies of scale. 14 This was to be achieved through the establishment a state-owned company, the National Electricity Board (Ente Nazionale per l'Energia Elettrica [ENEL]), which would take over the electricity-related assets of over 1,300 private electricity companies and would operate a nation-wide monopoly on the production, transport, transformation and distribution of electricity from all sources. 15 The companies affected by the nationalization -which were allowed to carry on their business operations outside the electricity sector -would receive a monetary compensation based on their stock exchange prices. 16 The final version of the nationalization statute gave the shareholders of the affected companies the option to swap their stocks in those companies with state-guaranteed ENEL bonds. 17 The minority parties strongly opposed the nationalization bill. The centre-right Italian Liberal Party, the right-wing Italian Democratic Party of Monarchist Unity and the extreme-right Italian Social Movement claimed that the monetary compensation envisaged by the bill did not reflect the market value of the nationalized assets, 18 thus harming the interests of the shareholders of the companies affected by the nationalization 19 and undermining public confidence in the stock market. 20 The minority parties also argued that electricity nationalization was a dangerous concession by the Christian Democrats to the Italian Socialist Party, 21 as it would trigger calls for the nationalization of other economic sectors, thus paving the way for Italy's transition to planned economy 22 or even the establishment of a full-fledged communist regime. 23 Last but not least, some members of the Italian Parliament 24 claimed that the nationalization bill was inconsistent with Italy's commitments under the 1957 Treaty Establishing the European Economic Community (EEC Treaty). 25 In spite of those criticisms, on 6 December 1962, the Italian Parliament enacted the Electricity Nationalization Statute (ENEL Statute). 26

Enter l'eroe borghese: Gian Galeazzo Stendardi
One of the most outspoken critics of the ENEL Statute was Gian Galeazzo Stendardi, a middle-aged lawyer, member of the Milan Bar and an assistant lecturer of constitutional law at the University of Milan. 27 Descended from the 16th-century military leader Goro Stendardi da Montebenichi, he was a man of legendary temper; during the student protests of 1968, he would carry on teaching even with only one student left in his lecture hall. 28 He was a known monarchist sympathizer with a good measure of political pragmatism, 29 as shown by his choice to run for the Milan City Council with the influential Italian Liberal Party rather than with one of the two largely insignificant monarchist parties. 30 Raised under the Gentilean ideal of the 'ethical state', Stendardi was deeply concerned about the status of representative democracy in Italy. 31 He complained that the Italian Parliament had been hijacked by interest groups and that the Christiandemocrat majority had allowed the Socialist minority to set the national political agenda. 32 The only solution, in Stendardi's view, was an 'activist conception of the rule of law'; 33 just as Rudolf von Jhering had theorized in Der Kampf ums Recht, Stendardi believed that every individual's struggle to assert his or her rights through judicial proceedings contributed to the progress of the legal order as a whole. 34 The author of one of the first scholarly treatments on judicial review of legislation by the Italian Constitutional Court (ICC), 35  albeit unsuccessfully, one of the earliest constitutionality challenges against the strict liability regime for newspaper editors set out in the Italian Criminal Code and in the Italian Press Law. 36 Moreover, following the 1957 Stresa Conference on the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), which marked the schism of the 'suparanationalists' from the international law academic community, 37 Stendardi wrote one of the first Italian treatises devoted entirely to the relationship between the legal order of the European Communities and the Italian one. 38 In that book, published in 1958, he took the view that the Community treaties included certain 'constitutional provisions' 39 -such as the EEC Treaty's common market freedoms 40 -that should be applied regardless of any contrary domestic statute, even if adopted subsequently. 41 The enactment of incompatible Italian statutes constituted a violation of Community law, which any individual could request the Community's executive 42 or, ultimately, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) to establish. 43 Moreover, in Stendardi's opinion, subsequent Italian statutes at variance with Community law were unconstitutional under Italian law, insofar as their adoption constituted, on the part of the Italian government, a re-appropriation of the sovereign powers transferred to the Communities under Article 11 of the Italian Constitution 44 upon the ratification of the Community Treaties. 45 In other words, Stendardi envisaged two ways to enforce the primacy of Community law over conflicting Italian statutes: first, a finding of unconstitutionality of those 36 (1958). 39 Ibid., at 39: '[A]ll the provisions [of the Community treaties] that concern the goals of the Communities, the means to achieve them, and the Community organs should be regarded … as constitutional norms.' 40 Ibid., at 103 (referring, by way of example, to the right of establishment and the free movement of capital). 41 Stendardi, supra note 38, at 50: '[I]n the context of the assessment of those conflicts, the Community constitutional norms should always be regarded as applicable.' 42 Ibid., at 51 (arguing that 'every natural or legal person, belonging to one of the Member States, is entitled to request the … Commission to establish the existence of a national norm contrary to the Treaties'). 43 Ibid., at 107 (arguing that 'it would be necessary to plead judicially such an illegality, in order to obtain a decision, for example of by the Court of Justice of the European Communities'). 44 'Italy … consents, on conditions of reciprocity with other States, to such limitations of its sovereignty as may be necessary to a world order ensuring peace and justice among the Nations. Italy promotes and supports international organisations pursuing that goal'. statutes, a power that the Italian legal order entrusted exclusively to the ICC (the 'centralized' model), and, second, the disapplication of the offending statutes, a task that could be carried out by any national court (the 'decentralized' model). In both cases, the involvement of the ECJ through the preliminary ruling procedure was essential, as it was for the ECJ to rule conclusively on whether Community law had to be interpreted as precluding the statutes concerned. Stendardi threw down his gauntlet at the Fanfani Cabinet's energy policy in a law review article published in 1962, where he clearly spelled out the legal consequences of a statute carrying out the nationalization of private companies: the violation of several articles of the Italian Constitution, to be established by the ICC, and the infringement of a number of provisions of the EEC Treaty, to be ascertained by the ECJ. 46 Individuals could not challenge an Italian statute directly before the ICC or the ECJ; they could challenge, however, an act based upon that statute before Italian 'ordinary' courts. That is where Flaminio Nicolino Costa came in; a lawyer at the Milan Bar of monarchist leanings and a fervent admirer of Stendardi, Costa happened to be both a shareholder and a customer of Edisonvolta, one of the companies involved in the nationalization process. 47 At Stendardi's suggestion, Costa did not allow ENEL employees to read his meter and refused to pay the first £1,925 electricity bill 48 that he received from ENEL in the spring of 1963. 49 In the context of the ensuing lawsuit before the Giudice Conciliatore (small-claims court) of Milan, Stendardi, on behalf of Costa, argued that ENEL had not validly taken over Costa's electricity supply contract with Edisonvolta because the ENEL Statute was both unconstitutional and incompatible with the EEC Treaty. 50 Stendardi thus requested the Giudice Conciliatore to refer the matter to the ICC to obtain a ruling on the constitutionality of the ENEL Statute and added that, since there was no right to appeal for claims worth less than £2,000, 51 the Giudice Conciliatore was also required to seek a preliminary ruling from the ECJ under Article 177(3) of the EEC Treaty. 52 However, by its order of 10 September 1963, the Giudice Conciliatore only referred the case to the ICC, noting that, 'if anything', it was for the latter to make a preliminary reference to the ECJ. 53

Chronicle of a Defeat Foretold: The Italian Constitutional Court Proceedings
Stendardi opened the written procedure stage before the ICC with an 89-page brief that contained no statement of facts, only a barrage of constitutional challenges. 54 He claimed that the ENEL Statute infringed: Article 67 of the Italian Constitution, 55 as it had been approved by the majority in pursuance of an imperative mandate given by certain stakeholders rather than in the interest of the whole nation; Article 43 of the Italian Constitution, 56 because the ENEL Statute was not in the general interest since it unduly delegated to the executive essential aspects of the nationalization process and since the monetary compensation it provided was inadequate relative to the value of the nationalized assets; Article 41 of the Italian Constitution, 57 because the ENEL Statute established a monopoly on electricity production and distribution, thus limiting the freedom of enterprise; and Article 3 of the Italian Constitution, 58 because the ENEL Statute discriminated between large and small electricity companies (by exempting the latter from nationalization) as well as between listed and non-listed companies (by laying down different criteria for the calculation of the monetary compensation). Most importantly, in line with the centralized primacy enforcement model outlined in his 1958 treatise, Stendardi argued that the ENEL Statute was unconstitutional under Article 11 of the Italian Constitution because it contravened several provisions of the EEC Treaty. 59 Namely, the ENEL Statute allegedly infringed: Articles 93 and 102 of the EEC Treaty, because the Italian government had failed to inform the Commission in advance of a measure liable, respectively, to favour certain undertakings and to distort competition within the common market; Article 53 of the EEC Treaty, because the ENEL Statute introduced new limitations on the right of establishment by entrusting exclusively to ENEL the production and distribution of electricity in Italy; and Article 37(2) of the EEC Treaty, insofar as the ENEL Statute established a new national 54 ICC, Case 192/63, Costa v. ENEL, Brief on behalf of Flaminio Costa, 8 October 1963. 55 'Each Member of Parliament shall represent the Nation and shall carry out his or her duties with no imperative mandate.' 56 'For purposes of the common good, the law may establish that an undertaking or a category thereof be reserved ex ante or transferred, through expropriation and subject to compensation, to the State, to public entities, or to workers' or users' associations, provided that such undertaking operates in the field of essential public services, energy sources or monopoly situations and is of overriding general interest.' 57 'Private economic initiative shall be free. It may not be carried out against the general interest or in such a manner that could undermine safety, liberty, or human dignity. The law shall provide for appropriate guidelines and oversight so that public and private-sector economic activity may be coordinated to pursue social goals.' 58 ' All citizens shall have equal social dignity and shall be equal before the law, without distinction of sex, race, language, religion, political opinion, personal and social condition. It shall be the duty of the Republic to remove those obstacles of an economic or social nature which, by limiting the liberty and equality of citizens, hinder the full development of the human person and the effective participation of all workers in the political, economic, and social governance of the country.' 59  monopoly. However, Stendardi added that, as contended by several legal scholars, 60 it was exclusively for the ECJ to interpret the provisions of the EEC Treaty, and, accordingly, he requested the ICC to refer the case to the ECJ for a preliminary ruling. 61 The Italian Council of Ministers, represented by State Deputy Attorney General Luciano Tracanna, objected that the only normative conflict at issue was the one arising between the ENEL Statute and the (earlier) Italian statute ratifying the EEC Treaty (EEC Statute), 62 which enjoyed no privileged status in the Italian hierarchy of legal sources by virtue of Article 11 of the Italian Constitution and which could thus be amended, departed from or even repealed by subsequent statutes. 63 Citing one of the earliest Community law textbooks in Italian, published by former ECJ judge Nicola Catalano, 64 the Council of Ministers further argued that any possible infringement of the EEC Treaty, whilst liable to trigger the enforcement mechanisms laid down in the EEC Treaty, was irrelevant from the perspective of the Italian legal order. 65 In its Judgment no. 14 of 24 February 1964, the ICC dismissed all of the constitutionality challenges brought against the ENEL Statute. 66 As to the violation of the EEC Treaty, the Italian juge des lois took the view that Article 11 of the Italian Constitution was merely a 'permissive' provision; it enabled the Italian Parliament to ratify treaties implying a limitation of Italy's sovereign powers through ordinary statutes in lieu of constitutional amendment, but it did not grant those statutes a higher rank relative to other statutes enacted by the Italian legislature. 67 Thus, although the infringement of the EEC Treaty could trigger Italy's international liability, it could neither deprive the ENEL Statute of its effects in the Italian legal order nor render it unconstitutional. 68 Since the conflict between the (earlier) EEC Statute and the (later) ENEL Statute had to be solved on the basis of the lex posterior derogat priori rule, 69 there was no need to seek a preliminary ruling from the ECJ as to the interpretation of the EEC Treaty. 70 60  The ICC judgment in Costa v. ENEL, for Stendardi, was the chronicle of a defeat foretold. From a legal perspective, the ICC embraced a dualist conception of the relationship between Community law and Italian law, in line with the largely predominant opinion of Italian international law scholars, 71 and affirmed the precedence of subsequent domestic statutes over Community law, an outcome that even a fervent federalist like Nicola Catalano had anticipated in his scholarly writings. 72 From a political perspective, the stakes of striking down the ENEL Statute -the very item of legislation upon which the Italian Socialist Party's support to the Fanfani Cabinet was conditional -were simply too high for the ICC, a court established only a few years earlier, 73 which operated in an 'inhospitable environment' 74 and which had hitherto focused more on cleansing the Italian legal system from Fascist-era legislation than on true counter-majoritarian judicial review. 75 By espousing the lex posterior thesis, thus, the ICC sought to pre-empt the ECJ's ruling -that is, to affirm the (domestic) legality of the ENEL Statute regardless of what the judges in Luxembourg could say as to that statute's compliance with the EEC Treaty.
Yet, the ICC did not declare the reference by the Giudice Conciliatore inadmissible, as some of the parties had requested. 76  Also, the ICC took that opportunity to put an end to the dispute over the constitutionality of the EEC Statute, 78 by endorsing the 'permissive' reading of Article 11 of the Italian Constitution that the ICC Chief Justice Gaspare Ambrosini had put forward 12 years earlier during the parliamentary proceedings on the ratification of the ECSC Treaty. 79 However, the ICC ruling in Costa v. ENEL caused significant dismay in EEC circles; 80 for the Commission legal service, it constituted an existential threat to the EEC, as it entailed a permanent imbalance between the member states that had accepted internal primacy and the ones that had not. 81 In addition, the ICC judgment seemingly deprived the preliminary ruling procedure of its purpose, at least for the Italian courts; if the latter were required to apply domestic law regardless of conflicting Community law, what use could they possibly have for a ruling on the interpretation or validity of the latter? 82 It is possibly for that reason that even the ECJ president Andreas Matthias Donner took the liberty of criticizing the 'ancient theory' underlying the ICC judgment at a conference in March 1964 -that is, while the Costa v. ENEL case was still pending before the ECJ. 83

Stendardi Goes All-In: The ECJ Proceedings
Stendardi had another card up his sleeve. As soon as he learned that the Giudice Conciliatore would not request a preliminary ruling from the ECJ, he lodged a complaint with another Giudice Conciliatore challenging the second £1,925 electricity bill that Costa had received from ENEL. 84  Statute inapplicable even in the absence of a prior finding of unconstitutionality by the ICC. 85 The Giudice Conciliatore, this time, was Vittorio Emanuele Fabbri, a former lawyer at the Milan Bar and a monarchist sympathizer like Stendardi. It is not certain whether and to what extent the two were actually acquainted 86 , but by his lengthy order of 16 January 1964 Fabbri unreservedly embraced Stendardi's argument that, as there would have been no judicial remedy under Italian law against his decisions, 87 he was legally required to refer the case not only to the ICC but also to the ECJ. 88 The ICC proceedings are of little interest to this account, as they did not deal with the EEC Treaty; suffice it to say that, by its Judgment no. 66 of 23 June 1965, the ICC dismissed all of the constitutionality challenges brought against the ENEL Statute. 89 Turning to the ECJ proceedings, Stendardi reiterated his claim that the ENEL Statute was incompatible with Articles 37, 53, 93 and 102 of the EEC Treaty. 90 Unlike the measured tones of his written submissions to the ICC, in his brief to the ECJ Stendardi had no qualms about defining the ENEL Statute as 'a terrible, prejudicial, and nefarious precedent for the future of Community integration', 91 a 'measure worthy of the Late Middle Ages, when tyrants sought to tear up Europe' 92 and 'an attempt to undermine Italy's free market economy … to pave the way for the doctrines of Marx, Engels, and Lenin'. 93 Stendardi also went all in with respect to the legal consequences of the alleged conflict between the ENEL Statute and the EEC Treaty; as an alternative to the centralized primacy enforcement model, which the ICC had expressly ruled out in Judgment no. 14 of 24 February 1964, Stendardi championed the decentralized model, viz. he argued that a preliminary ruling by the ECJ would have enabled Italian courts to immediately disapply the ENEL Statute. 94 The Italian government, represented by Luciano Tracanna and the eminent international law professor Riccardo Monaco, matched Stendardi's all-in by claiming that the request for a preliminary ruling was 'absolutely inadmissible'; since the referring court had to apply the ENEL Statute regardless of any conflicting provision of the EEC Treaty, that court had no use for the interpretation of the EEC Treaty requested from 85 91 Ibid., at 38. 92 Ibid., at 36. 93 Ibid. 94 Ibid., at 8-9, 14-15. the ECJ. 95 The Italian government added that the order for reference, in fact, sought a ruling on the consistency between the ENEL Statute and the EEC Treaty, a type of pronouncement that could only be obtained, at the request of the Commission or of another member state, through the infringement procedure laid down in Articles 169 and 170 of the EEC Treaty. 96 The European Commission, represented by its legal counsel Giuseppe Marchesini, shared the reservations expressed by the Italian government as to the referring court's 'alternative use' of the preliminary ruling procedure, 97 but deemed it appropriate to submit its observations to the ECJ in light of the 'troubling' findings set out in ICC's Judgment no. 14 of 24 February 1964. 98 The Commission took the view that the ICC's refusal to recognize the internal primacy of the EEC Treaty vis-à-vis subsequent domestic statutes was not only liable to undermine the functioning of the common market in Italy, but also could have inevitable repercussions on the whole Community. 99 The Commission also expressed the wish that the ICC's jurisprudence would not be regarded as final until the ECJ had had the opportunity to rule on the scope of the commitments undertaken by the member states as to the effects of the EEC Treaty in their respective legal orders. 100 At the hearing of 11 June 1964, both Costa and Stendardi took the floor, but only the former addressed the issue of primacy. 101 After a bombastic salute to the 'supreme judiciary of the Community, our new great motherland', 102 Costa challenged the Italian government's contention that the referring court was obliged to apply only the ENEL Statute and insisted on the admissibility of the request for a preliminary ruling. 103 He also averred that the Commission's concerns about the ICC ruling were well founded but added that the ICC might change its mind in light of the ECJ's findings on primacy. 104 Finally, he noted that it would be absurd for the Italian government to insist on applying the EEC Treaty only insofar as it was advantageous but not to the extent that it was inconvenient, as such a selective application of Community law was clearly at odds with the principle qui habet commoda, ferre debet onera. 105 95 ECJ, Case 6/64, Costa v. ENEL, Brief on behalf of the Italian government, 20 May 1964, at 5. 96 Ibid., at 5-6. 97 The 'alternative use' of the preliminary ruling procedure consists in seeking a ruling from the ECJ on the compatibility with EU law of a domestic provision. See Tizzano, 'Foglia-Novello atto II, ovvero la crisi dell' "uso alternativo" dell'art. 177  In contrast, ENEL's attorney, professor Massimo Severo Giannini, one of the most prominent Italian scholars of administrative law of all times, 106 downplayed the importance of the ICC's judgment. 107 He claimed that the ICC had refused to rule on a conflict between Community law and Italian legislation because its jurisdiction was very limited compared to, say, that of the US Supreme Court; the ICC, indeed, could only resolve conflicts between the Italian Constitution and Italian statutes.
Finally, the lawyer for the Italian government, Luciano Tracanna, took the floor. In a somewhat convoluted oral argument, he reiterated the claim that the preliminary ruling procedure did not enable individuals to request a pronouncement on the violation of the EEC Treaty 108 and that, in any case, national courts were not entitled to suspend the application of Italian laws. 109 In his Opinion in Costa v. ENEL, Advocate General Maurice Lagrange, who had replaced Advocate General Karl Roemer in that lawsuit on 9 June 1964, 110 took the view that the resolution of a conflict between the EEC Treaty and subsequent domestic legislation was 'a constitutional problem'. 111 Whilst some member states, such as the Netherlands, had solved it 'in a most satisfactory manner', there were still 'difficulties of principle' in Italy. 112 In particular, the ICC's Judgment no. 14 of 24 February 1964, which had granted precedence to an Italian subsequent statute inconsistent with the EEC Treaty, could have 'disastrous consequences' for the functioning of the common market. 113 Nonetheless, Advocate General Lagrange hoped that Italy could 'find a constitutional means of allowing the Community to live in full accordance with the rules created under its common charter'. 114 Advocate General Lagrange also invited the ECJ to dismiss the plea of inadmissibility. 'The only problem which could possibly arise', he added, was whether Italian courts could autonomously refuse to apply national statutes at variance with the EEC Treaty or they were bound to refer the matter to the ICC first. 115 The Advocate General noted that this was a matter of the division of internal jurisdiction between Italian courts and that the ECJ should still provide a preliminary ruling since, 'even if premature as regards domestic procedure', it 'will have effect also as regards the Constitutional Court' and thus 'will even have saved time'. 116 The contents of the ECJ's landmark judgment of 15 July 1964 in Costa v. ENEL are well known. 117 In line with Van Gen en Loos, the ECJ distinguished the EEC Treaty from 'ordinary international treaties' and averred that the Community legal order, to the benefit of which the member states had 'limited their sovereign rights', had become an 'integral part' of national legal systems, that Community provisions bound member states and their nationals alike and that also domestic courts were 'bound to apply' Community norms. 118 From such 'integration into the laws of each Member State' and from the 'terms and the spirit of the Treaty', the ECJ inferred that it was 'impossible' for member states' organs to accord precedence to domestic measures over Community law, 119 as doing so would jeopardize the attainment of the objectives of the EEC Treaty contrary to the principle of loyal cooperation, give rise to discrimination on the basis of nationality, deprive of their purpose the specific procedures laid down in the EEC Treaty to authorize member states to derogate therefrom, undermine the 'direct applicability' of regulations, and call into question the 'legal basis' and the very 'character' of the EEC. 120 Therefore, the ECJ dismissed the plea of inadmissibility and ruled that Article 177 of the EEC Treaty, on the preliminary ruling procedure, had 'to be applied regardless of any domestic law, whenever questions relating to the interpretation of the Treaty arise'. 121 Member states' courts were thus entrusted with a European 'mandate' 122 to 'disapply' domestic statutes at variance with the EEC Treaty. 123 On the merits, however, the ECJ essentially upheld the ENEL Statute. The Community judges took the view that Articles 93 and 102 of the EEC Treaty, requiring member states to inform the Commission of prospective measures favouring certain undertakings or liable to distort competition, had no direct effect and thus could not be relied upon by individuals; 124 that Article 53 of the EEC Treaty was satisfied as long as no new measure made the establishment of nationals from other member states subject to more severe rules than those applying to the nationals of the country of establishment; 125 and that Article 37 of the EEC Treaty was not infringed as long as domestic monopolies did not entail any new cases of discrimination regarding the conditions under which goods were procured and marketed, an issue the ECJ left to the referring court to determine. 126 Again, this outcome comes as no surprise. Establishing that nationalizations and monopolies in the utilities sector were contrary to EEC law would have alienated not only Italy, but also other member states that had implemented or planned to introduce similar measures, such as France. 127 Also, the ECJ would have been unable to enforce a ruling to that effect, considering that, at the time, it could not impose sanctions on member states via the infringement procedure 128 and that the doctrine of state liability would only be introduced several years later. 129 By opting for a politically low-profile ruling 130 and a narrow understanding of the direct effect and pre-emptive scope of the EEC Treaty provisions at issue, the ECJ could thus affirm a strong version of internal primacy (and safeguard the effet utile of the preliminary ruling procedure) without triggering any significant opposition from member states' governments. 131 Remarkably enough, when the case was referred back to the Giudice Conciliatore, the latter turned out to be 'more Catholic than the Pope'; in its judgment of 4 May 1966, he found that the ENEL Statute introduced a new monopoly entailing discrimination between Italian citizens and citizens of other member states in the market of electricity supply contrary to Article 37 of the EEC Treaty. 132 Accordingly, Judge Fabbri ruled that the ENEL Statute and its implementing decrees had 'no effects in the case at issue' and that Costa did not owe ENEL the sum of £1,925 shown on the impugned electricity bill. 133 Although that ruling was reported by a handful of legal commentators, it did not set a legal precedent for subsequent lawsuits. 134 The ENEL Statute, thus, remained firmly in place, prompting Stendardi's bitter remark that, all in all, the ECJ ruling in Costa v. ENEL had limited the instances in which individuals could claim that domestic statutes infringed the EEC Treaty, thus denying the central role that, in Stendardi's view, individuals were meant to have in the protection and development of the EEC legal order. 135

Epilogue: The Contribution of Costa v. ENEL and Stendardi to the Approfondissement of EU Primacy
Tout va par degrés dans la nature, et rien par saut. 136 Likewise, the principle of EU primacy did not emerge all at once with the ECJ ruling in Costa v. ENEL, but did so gradually and through a number of small steps. 137 In the early 1960s, the 'international' primacy of treaties -that is, the prevalence of treaty provisions over domestic legislation in the relations between the contracting parties -was already well established. 138 In contrast, the 'internal' primacy of treaties -that is, the prevalence of treaty provisions over domestic law within the municipal legal orders -was far from settled, at least in countries of long-standing dualist tradition like Italy. 139 Turning to the law of the then European Communities, although in 1960 the ECJ had ruled in Humblet that the provisions of the ECSC Treaty 'have the force of law in the Member States following their ratification and … take precedence over national law', 140 the prevailing view was that the rank of Community law within the member states' legal orders was a matter of national law. 141 In Italy, in particular, most authors agreed that Community law took precedence over earlier domestic statutes but could be overridden by subsequent statutes. 142 However, in 1962, the director general of the European Commission's Legal Service, Michel Gaudet, argued that such a piecemeal approach was incompatible with the specific characteristics of the EEC 143 and that the effects of Community law within member states' legal orders had to be inferred from the EEC Treaty itself, as interpreted by the ECJ. 144  should take precedence over domestic statutes, even if adopted subsequently. 145 The president of the European Commission, Walter Hallstein, publicly reaffirmed that view at a speech before the European Parliament delivered on 18 June 1964 -that is, less than a month before the ECJ rendered its judgment in Costa v. ENEL. 146 The ECJ's judgment in Van Gend en Loos, 147 of 5 February 1963, clarified that certain EEC Treaty provisions 'create[d] individual rights which national courts must protect'. 148 In order to facilitate the acceptance of the doctrine of direct effect at the national level, the ECJ judges deliberately chose not to address the issue of internal primacy, 149 also because Netherlands constitutional law autonomously enabled domestic courts to set aside national legislation that was incompatible with self-executing international agreements. 150 Yet, the ECJ's silence was a particularly 'deafening' one, as it begged the question whether, in a similar situation, also courts from a dualist member state like Italy would have been able to apply directly effective Community provisions notwithstanding incompatible subsequent statutes. 151 The ECJ ruling in Costa v. ENEL is thus appropriately regarded as a 'legal revolution' 152 because, whilst it did not create the principle of internal primacy of what is now EU law ex nihilo, 153 it did constitute an essential step in the approfondissement of 145  that doctrine, 154 by empowering national courts to set aside domestic statutes at variance with EU law. It cannot be ruled out that, without the Costa v. ENEL saga, the internal primacy of EU law would have emerged anyway. 155 After all, a growing body of legal scholarship, 156 the European Commission's Legal Service 157 and even some ECJ members 158 had already leaned in that direction before 1964.
But it seems fair to say that, in such a counterfactual scenario, EU primacy would be significantly different from the doctrine we know today. In particular, it seems doubtful that, without the ICC's judgment in Costa v. ENEL of 24 February 1964which, as noted above, posed an existential threat to the EEC and a direct challenge to the ECJ's preliminary jurisdiction -the ECJ would have entrusted national courts with the mandate to disapply national statutes incompatible with Community law as early as in 1964. 159 Had the ICC been requested to rule on a conflict between Community law and an item of domestic legislation of lesser importance for Italy's political and economic stability than the ENEL Statute, the Italian justices might have been willing to review it under Article 11 of the Italian Constitution, thus extending their power of judicial review to conflicts involving Community law without deviating from the wellestablished dualist understanding of the relations between the Community legal order and the Italian one. 160 In fact, the centrist Ambrosini Court might have taken that judges are often unfamiliar with the preliminary ruling procedure; 169 in a survey conducted by the European Parliament in 2011, as many as six national judges out of 10 admitted to lacking sufficient knowledge as to how to make a preliminary reference to the ECJ. 170 Another reason is that national lower courts are frequently under significant work pressure, so they might regard dialogue with the ECJ as a distraction from their duty to deliver justice in concrete situations within a reasonable time. 171 The actions of the second Giudice Conciliatore in the Costa v. ENEL saga, Judge Fabbri, appear more consistent with the 'judicial empowerment' narrative. Indeed, he referred the case to the ECJ and, following the preliminary ruling, he disapplied the ENEL Statute and ruled in favour of Costa, thus enforcing the primacy of Community law, notwithstanding a strong ruling in the opposite direction by his brethren in Via della Consulta. Yet, having regard to the very beginning of this empowerment tale, it is clear that Judge Fabbri's reference to the ECJ stemmed not so much from the motu proprio initiative of an ambitious judge, who took advantage of an existing dispute over an electricity bill to raise the question of the primacy of Community law, but was prompted by a carefully constructed lawsuit brought by a profound connoisseur of the relationship between Italian and Community law such as Stendardi.
In fact, all evidence suggests that there would have been no Costa v. ENEL without Stendardi: first, he sought out and found Costa, a customer and shareholder of one of the nationalized electricity companies and, thus, the perfect complainant for a lawsuit against ENEL; second, Stendardi persuaded Costa not to allow ENEL employees to read his meter and not to pay two ENEL electricity bills, thus giving rise to two lawsuits that, because of their limited value, had to be handled by the Giudice Conciliatore as a court of last instance, thus triggering the obligation to make a preliminary reference under Article 177(3) of the EEC Treaty; third, he cajoled two Italian magistrateswho presumably were not familiar with Italian constitutional justice, let alone with the preliminary ruling procedure -to refer the matter to the ICC and, in one case, also to the ECJ; 172 fourth, he faced off against some of Italy's most prominent lawyers and academics of the time -and ultimately prevailed; 173 finally, he obtained an ECJ judgment that not only reflects his views on primacy but also contains a passage that matches -almost verbatim! -a sentence from his 1958 treatise on the relationship between Italian and Community law. 174 In sum, Stendardi not only prophesized EU primacy but also saw to it that his prophecy would be fulfilled. Yet his name still lies in obscurity -as so often happens, nemo propheta in patria sua. 175 It is thus time to finally recognize Stendardi as one of the earliest 'Euro-lawyers' 176 -that is, a number of entrepreneurial attorneys who constructed ad hoc lawsuits and sometimes even ghost-wrote preliminary references to further Europe's 'integration through law' 177 by exploiting the appeal that judicial empowerment had to some national courts 178 -and, arguably, as the 'prime architect' of the primacy of EU law.