‘Europe between fragmentation and coherence – promoting legal frames for a social EU’

Abstract – ‘23 June 2016 may seem as the EU’s watershed moment: a slim majority of citizens participating in a referendum on the UK’s continuing EU membership voted to leave the EU. While certainly informed by national (and subnational) peculiarities, the vote and subsequent implementation also mirror fragmentations of Europe relevant beyond the UK. Those fragmentations encompass the waning power of EUropean integration through law in the face of an ongoing economic crisis and related societal disintegration. Independently from and before the “Brexit” vote, the EU had attracted criticism in particular related to its social legitimacy. The criticism frequently reverts to demanding that social legitimacy within the EU should be engendered by protecting national social models against intrusion from EU levels, instead of creating EU level solidarity. This paper argues for a more positive vision of legal circles of EU integration, in which social integration becomes a theme for a new EUropean integration through law. It develops examples on the potential of legal frames for social legitimacy, focusing on fields experienced as critical such as free movement of persons’

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