Europe’s Crisis‐Law and the Welfare State – A Critique. WP CSDLE “Massimo D’Antona”.INT – 109/2014

Giubboni, Stefano (2014) Europe’s Crisis‐Law and the Welfare State – A Critique. WP CSDLE “Massimo D’Antona”.INT – 109/2014. [Working Paper]

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Abstract

The great economic crisis – the worst and longest at least since the post-war period, which is still holding a large part of Europe in an unequal grip – has a constitutional dimension that has certainly been overlooked, compared to other more direct and visible repercussions. In recent years the measures put into force by supranational institutions, both outside and within the traditional channels of EU law, to counteract the sovereign debt crisis by deeply modifying the economic governance of the Union, have in fact ended up questioning some of the most established paradigms that have historically forged – and constitutionally legitimised – the process of ‘integration through law’. According to the most credited of these paradigms, European integration should be conceived – particularly in its foundation – as a political project, the implementation of which is essentially left to economic processes mediated by the law. The German ‘Ordoliberal’ theorists grasped the meaning of this project better than others,1 identifying the constitutional anchorage of the newly-born European Economic Community (EEC) with the fundamental economic freedoms and with the system of undistorted competition established by the 1957 Treaty of Rome. Economic and monetary Union (EMU) would have had to refine this project by bringing it to completion; but as is well known the foundation of the whole edifice started to erode soon after its construction.

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