One of the most remarkable features of the early Revolution was the absence of direct communication between the Third Estate and Louis XVI. The king had given no instructions about how to regulate communication between himself and the orders. The matter devolved to the Keeper of the Seals, Charles Louis François de Paule de Barentin, who took it upon himself to act as the supervisor for everything related to the Estates General. He became the conduit through which communication between the orders and Louis passed. But Barentin was deeply hostile to the pretensions of the Third Estate, going back at least as far as the time of the Result of the King’s Council of State of 1788. Until mid July, Barentin managed communications to the benefit of the Noble order, generally refusing to find times for members of the Third Estate to meet with the king. During the stalemate, the deputies of the Third Estate had only been given one meeting with Louis and it was at the worst time possible, coming two days after the death of the king’s oldest son.

The French Revolution (1789–99) marked the beginning of modern politics. For the first time, a major European state moved from traditional monarchical rule to a more democratic, participatory political system, creating its own institutions as it went. The French Revolution erupted from a stalemate that had developed between the French Crown and traditional political and social elites over how to reform the way in which the state financed itself. The old system could not keep up with the demands placed on it by generations of war. It was hamstrung by the woefully unfair imposition and inefficient collection of taxes. By the time Louis XVI (r. 1774–92) asked his subjects for assistance and advice in the winter of 1787, the system was already under considerable strain. But the French elites refused to accept the plan proposed by their king without being granted a large and permanent role in the kingdom’s political system. The king would not give it to them.

The forms of political representation in France before 1789 were nothing like political representation in our modern sense of the term. There were no elected representative bodies at the national level and the provinces had systems that varied greatly. The pays d’états had provincial estates that had some elective elements, but the pays d’élection had no province-wide representative bodies at all. The Catholic Church had its own assembly, but this assembly did not represent the church to the king, as the king was nominally its leader. There were only three political bodies that had any pretension to being “representative” and none functioned in a way that we moderns would recognize as representative government. First and foremost was the king himself. Though he was not elected or accountable in any way to those he represented, he did function as a symbol of France and it was only through the king that there was any unity among the diverse peoples, provinces and corporations that made up the kingdom.

The European Union is caught in a trap; but is this a trap of the European Union’s own making? Following Dani Rodrik’s analysis, the problem might be argued to be akin to the ‘trilemma’ associated with economic globalisation. For as long as the Union fails to overcome its founding functionalism and eschews its own (federal) ‘statalisation’, it will only ever be able to guarantee two out of three cherished notions of economic integration, national sovereignty and democracy. The parings might vary: sovereignty can always be combined with (national) democracy, just as trade liberalisation can be undertaken in a democratic manner (albeit of the Europeanised variety); yet, the simultaneous presence of all three concepts is an impossibility, a simple and inevitable consequence of the effort to move beyond the traditional structures of the nation state in pursuit of a single, integrated European market.

In the period spanning nearly a decade from the beginning of the financial crisis to the present, the constitutional state and state system in Europe has been affected by a series of challenges to its authority and legitimacy. With regard to the European Union, these challenges are fundamental in that they go to the very existence of the project and to the values it professes to be founded on. They seem increasingly interconnected to the EU and the trajectory of integration rather than merely external to it. For the moment, the EU remains relatively resilient; outside of the UK, appetite for ending the experiment mostly inhabits the political fringes, although even in core countries, anti-European pressures are mounting and Eurosceptic parties are on the ascendency. What is clear is that the challenges to the current system go as much to the legitimacy of domestic regimes and their political authority as to the EU itself, not least from the fragmentary pressures on the state from below in the context of subnational claims to autonomy. In short, the crisis of authority is not merely of the EU but of the regional state system and the governing order in Europe.

Almost ten years since the eruption of the global and financial crisis of 2008 and its European manifestation as the ‘Eurocrisis’, there is growing consensus that the latter quickly escalated or mutated into (among other things) a more profound democratic crisis. A number of prominent public intellectuals put pen to paper to warn not only of a crisis of European democracy, but of a crisis of the very ‘political institution’ of democracy, and particularly its representative and liberal variants. Contemporary manifestations of the ‘hollowing out’ of democracy following the Eurocrisis have taken many forms and several contributions in this volume have dealt with various aspects of the phenomenon.

The focus of the present chapter is on one aspect of this crisis, namely the Eurocrisis as a crisis of the EU’s own democratic credentials. Even as they insisted on its purely economic character, commentators were quick to criticise the undemocratic form that the emergency EMU-related responses to the Eurocrisis came to assume, particularly at the European level, where not only parliamentary processes, but also the Treaties’ legal prescriptions, were systematically circumvented.

This chapter focuses on the trajectory of the European Union in order to elucidate and discuss its current problems. My main argument unfolds on the historically proven premise that the uneven and combined development of different national economies produces a major contradiction between the trend for greater integration and the continued assertion of national interests, a contradiction which is not likely to be transcended in the near future. My analysis brings forward two points, through a historical exploration of the European integration process.

First, I suggest that what invites further research and guides the formation and the development of the European integration process is geopolitical antagonism. This antagonism has two dimensions. The first revolves around the EU Member States, as countries in competition with each other, and the second encapsulates the ‘external’ antagonism of these nations as parts of a single entity (Europe) vis-à-vis the big geopolitical powers outside Europe (the Soviet Union in a former period, the United States, Russia and China nowadays).

Legal texts are the outcome of political processes. As such they provide an insight into the deep ideological changes that may be taking place within any legal system. In this chapter, we propose to contrast two important instruments of the EC/EU, the first being the Community Charter of the Fundamental Social Rights of Workers of 1989, and the other being the EU Social Pillar of 2017. The aim is not to engage in a literal compare and contrast of the two instruments, as one might compare and contrast apples and oranges; rather, it is to engage in a contextual compare and contrast of the two instruments, with a view to understanding what they tell us about the changing economic and political direction of the EU. In doing so we aim better to understand the evolution of social policy, the changing role of trade unions within the EU, and the inactivity in relation to employment rights despite the great changes in the global economy and working practices since the last employment law directive was produced in 2008.

Legal texts are the outcome of political processes. As such they provide an insight into the deep ideological changes that may be taking place within any legal system. In this chapter, we propose to contrast two important instruments of the EC/EU, the first being the Community Charter of the Fundamental Social Rights of Workers of 1989, and the other being the EU Social Pillar of 2017. The aim is not to engage in a literal compare and contrast of the two instruments, as one might compare and contrast apples and oranges; rather, it is to engage in a contextual compare and contrast of the two instruments, with a view to understanding what they tell us about the changing economic and political direction of the EU. In doing so we aim better to understand the evolution of social policy, the changing role of trade unions within the EU, and the inactivity in relation to employment rights despite the great changes in the global economy and working practices since the last employment law directive was produced in 2008.

Legitimacy is essential for any polity that seeks to exert law-making authority over its people. Although the EU is not a single state, it is a polity that has to obtain legitimacy for its power to make laws affecting some 500 million people across twenty-eight Member States (soon to be twenty-seven pending UK exit). And yet in the eyes of EU citizens the Eurozone crisis and Brexit vote call into question the EU’s legitimacy as it cannot guarantee prosperity for all its peoples or shield against economic and political uncertainty. There is growing unease and disaffection, particularly among southern EU states’ voters, and divisions between core–peripheral Member States, with emerging alternative popular representation structures (e.g. Podemos in Spain) and reappraisal of the EU, even among pro-EU politicians (e.g. the British left-wing, albeit historically deep divisions have remained since the membership referendum of 1975 with vocal Labour Eurosceptics such as Tony Benn and Jeremy Corbyn). In this context, ‘core’ Member States refers to the advanced economies and strong democracies including the original founding members (Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands), and new members from the enlargement period between 1973 and 1995 (Denmark, Ireland, the UK, Greece, Portugal, Spain, Austria, Finland, Sweden).

The European Union is caught in a trap; but is this a trap of the European Union’s own making? Following Dani Rodrik’s analysis, the problem might be argued to be akin to the ‘trilemma’ associated with economic globalisation. For as long as the Union fails to overcome its founding functionalism and eschews its own (federal) ‘statalisation’, it will only ever be able to guarantee two out of three cherished notions of economic integration, national sovereignty and democracy. The parings might vary: sovereignty can always be combined with (national) democracy, just as trade liberalisation can be undertaken in a democratic manner (albeit of the Europeanised variety); yet, the simultaneous presence of all three concepts is an impossibility, a simple and inevitable consequence of the effort to move beyond the traditional structures of the nation state in pursuit of a single, integrated European market.

This chapter analyses the Treaty on Stability Coordination and Governance (TSCG), as an emblematic example of the New Economic Governance. The New Economic Governance is the ensemble of economic and fiscal reforms that were introduced in the wake of the financial crisis. In this work, when we talk about New Economic Governance we refer specifically to: the European Semester; the Six-Pack; the Two-Pack; and the TSCG, better known by the name of its Third Title, ‘Fiscal Compact’. All these measures have been adopted by European institutions to deal with the financial speculation on the euro and the financial crisis after 2008. Together with the Financial Aid Programmes and the extraordinary measures of the European Central Bank (ECB), these financial and economic regulations form the institutional answer to the financial crisis in Europe.