Michael Wilkinson’s Authoritarian Liberalism is an important, and, in many respects, praiseworthy contribution to the debates on the present state of the European Union (EU) and its highly problematical future. Its recourse to political economy in the re-construction of the integration project contrasts innovatively and instructively with the usual, if subtle, stories told about the history of Europe’s “integration through law” and its promotion of an “ever closer union among the peoples of Europe”. The spectre of “authoritarian liberalism” is a counter-narrative which exhibits the socio-economic dimensions and forces us to consider the political quality of European rule, in which Europe’s “material constitution” is a key concept of these analyses. “Authoritarian liberalism” is more than just a catchy characterisation of Europe’s constitutional constellation. The resort to this notion ties in with a conceptual history that definitely deserves to be remembered and continued.

The focus of the present contribution is the role of European Union (EU) law in shaping the working conditions of four groups of vulnerable workers. It assesses to what extent the impact of EU law favours, on these particular groups, an increased risk of In-Work Poverty (IWP) and explores whether the recent attention to IWP at EU level and the latest initiatives adopted may change the picture in the near future. The purpose is, therefore, to contribute to the debate on the role of EU law and policy in structuring vulnerability from the perspective of IWP. What is commonly known as EU labour law is a fragmentary legal corpus that has grown in a rather patchwork fashion as part of a social dimension of the European project that was, broadly speaking, functional to the logic of market integration. This originates in the early division of competences between the EU and the Member States in the Treaty of Rome, which left labour law and social protection outside the EU sphere of action. It partly explains why the protection of workers, particularly those that do not engage in cross-border situations, does not seem to be the EU’s primary goal, or at least it is not formulated as contrary to other potentially clashing rationales such as market integration, flexibility, enhanced competitiveness and so on. The prevention of IWP was not, in any case, one of the concerns of the original European project. Yet, EU law has produced several pieces of legislation that directly or indirectly contribute to shaping the working conditions of European workers, including those more exposed to IWP. The paper assesses the relevant EU legal framework and discusses its impact on the working conditions of those more at risk of IWP. It concludes by estimating the potential of a series of recent initiatives to enhance the protection of the most vulnerable workers, thus making a positive change.

The history of European integration, even if yet a rather minor sub-field, has seen a good deal of developments in the last two decades. New scholars have joined the field and new topics of research have been considered. Megan Brown’s The Seventh Member State is an impressive contribution to the literature. The book does not only demonstrate that a main goal of the European Economic Community was to rescue the imperial nation-state, but illustrates the point by means of considering the complex relationship between France and Algeria, also marked by Algeria becoming part of the territory of the European Economic Community. As Brown shows, this had lasting effects, especially after Algeria’s independence. Doubts, however, can be raised regarding the extent to which the title of the book is not a trifle exaggerated. Not least because Algeria was never offered the status of member state, but remained subordinated to France. If its territory was part of the EEC, it was indeed as a result of the peculiar status assigned to Algeria under French law. In addition, it could be argued that the conclusions of the book would have been strengthened if a wider set of archives and literature would have been consulted (Dutch and German, and above all Algerian literature).

The publication in 2017 of Dawn of a New World (I B Tauris) confirmed Rein Müllerson as one of the great international lawyers of his generation. His career is deeply marked by the recent history of Europe. He was a young director of the Department of International Law of the Academy of Sciences of Moscow in the 1980s, doubling down as legal advisor to Gorbachev during the decisive years of perestroika and glasnost. It is not an exaggeration to say that, in those hectic days, Müllerson saw history unfolding from the machine room of the Kremlin. In the 1990s, after a brief but very intense period as secretary of state of the newborn Estonian Republic, Müllerson joined academia again as professor of international law at the LSE first, then at King’s College. His inexhaustible stamina allowed him to wear a second hat as adviser on human rights to the United Nations, spending quite some time in Central Asia. After his retirement from King’s College, he returned in the 2010s to Tallinn as dean of the newly established School of Governance. The following text is the result of a number of conversations, some in Tallinn, others forced by circumstances through video connection. The range of issues is as wide as Müllerson’s interests, hopefully offering the reader views which are out of the common road. Not only because of the multiplicity of perspectives he is privy to, thanks to his extremely rich academic and personal trajectory, but also because of his commitment to diversity and pluralism.

In The Seventh Member State, I show that imperial concerns were central to the original shape of the European Communities, in particular French anxieties about Algeria. The latter had been imagined by several generations of French as an extension of the metropole across the Mediterranean, while at the same time a majority of the population was not granted citizenship rights. While in 1951 France opted for the exclusion of Algeria from the territory of the Coal and Steel Community, in 1957 the strategy followed was the opposite, and Algeria was made part of the EEC, not least because this seemed to reinforce French claim that the territory was part of France and, perhaps above all, it rendered possible to obtain the financial support of the other five founding states for costly Algerian development projects. Labelling Algeria a seventh member state, as is done in the title of the book, calls the attention of the reader not only to the sweeping expanse of postwar European institutions, which lasted even after states such as Algeria gained independence, but also to the contestable and contested conception of Member State. Mainly intended as a piece in French history, the book illuminates the extent to which Europe was the main vehicle of the rescue of the imperial nation-state, and how white supremacy and colonial rule were maintained through a peculiar combination of the rule of law and states of emergency.

This response to critics gives me the opportunity to develop some aspects of the argument in Authoritarian Liberalism and the Transformation of Modern Europe. I do so by foregrounding the concept of political freedom, articulated by Franz Neumann. Authoritarian liberalism operates by suppressing political freedom and democracy. First making its mark in late Weimar, authoritarian liberalism is constructed in a more passive fashion in the decades after the Second Word War. Although it is contested by social movements in the 1960’s and 70’s, it is ultimately reinforced in the turn to neoliberalism. This reaches its apogee at the Treaty of Maastricht, with the de-politicization of economic and monetary union and the deepening and widening of the European Union. German ordoliberalism, which functions as an ideological support to authoritarian liberalism, is instructive, but is only a part of this story; Germany is at most ‘semi-hegemonic’ in Europe. Authoritarian liberalism operates instead through limiting the constitutional imagination in all member states of the Union. I end with some reflections on Walter Benjamin, whose philosophy of history inspired the cover of the book.

It is widely acknowledged that the contextual study of European Community law, later European Union law, has contributed to a richer understanding of EC/EU law. This review proposes a contextual reconstruction and analysis of EC/EU law in context, or what is the same, it considers the institutions, milieus and debates which fostered the analysis and assessment of EC and EU law as ‘an intricate web of politics, economics and law’, at the same time that facilitated the development of critical self-consciousness about the underlying assumptions that scholars (including contextual scholars) bring to their study of law. This is done by engaging with the work of Francis Snyder, and in particular, with his groundbreaking collection “New Directions in European Community law”.

As the Second World War was drawing to a close in 1944, two great works of political economy were published. One of them was Friedrich August von Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom,1 inspiring the defenders of free market movements ever since and up to the present. The other was Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation.2 This essay will focus on Polanyi but also pay tribute to Hayek. Contrasting the two helps to understand both of them better. Of the two, Hayek, the Nobel prize winner, is of course more widely known and by far more influential. But Polanyi’s work, too, has achieved and has been attracting as of recently such attention that one of the Directors of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne proclaimed that ‘we are all Polanyian now’,3 not only in economic sociology, but also in related disciplines, including, of course, political economy and political theory. A plethora of aspects of The Great Transformation are very widely discussed. This essay will be concerned with the not-so-well explored importance of Polanyi’s work for European Law and legal scholarship in general, including his theorems on the ‘embedded economy’, his conceptualisation of labour as a ‘fictitious commodity’ as well as the notion of counter-movements. It will then juxtapose Polanyi’s expectation of a new international order with the development of the European integration project and sketch out the contours of the democracy-enhancing conflicts law and its affinities with Polanyian core normative principles.

This is a review of the edited collection of Jan Klabbers and Gianluigi Palombella, ‘The Challenge of Inter-Legality’ (Cambridge, 2019). It considers how the volume revisits the influential concept of ‘inter-legally’, introduced by the Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos 35 years ago. The main focus of the review is an evaluation of the editors' innovative and extended attempt, supported by many of the contributions, to account for inter-legality not simply as a sociological phenomenon - an effect of the interpenetration of legal orders - but as an idea with its own specifically legal content. In so doing, the editors provide a new normative dimension to our understanding of contemporary legal pluralism on the global stage. It is important, however, to continue to recognise the limitations of any single juridical idea in contributing to our understanding of global (in)justice.