This Article considers the role of ideas in shaping law and policy processes, serving to facilitate certain actions or approaches while curtailing others. Using the development of the EU’s governance approach to online service providers and platforms, this Article demonstrates how ordoliberalism as a set of beliefs regarding the regulation of market activity through law have shaped the understanding of appropriate measures for combating hybrid threats such as disinformation. Highlighting the origins of the E-Commerce Directive and the influence of ordoliberalism in the application of a regulated self-regulation model, the Article explores how ordoliberal philosophical ideas have influenced programme and policy level ideas concerning EU cyberspace governance as it relates to online platform activities. Even where there has been discursive change regarding the role of online platforms in contributing to an environment of insecurity, there has nevertheless been ideational continuity in the approach to their regulation, dictating the legal response in the Digital Services Act.

In search of a climate-neutral Europe, the EU Green Deal presented agroecology as an alternative guide for food system transitions through explicit policy and regulatory actions. While the term agroecology is used in Green Deal policy documents, its meaning remains elusive in both policymaking and academic legal research. To explore existing regulatory frameworks’ potential to align with agroecological perspectives for food system transitions, this article analyses pesticide regulation, a core area of agricultural governance, using an agroecological framework. This article aims to contribute to the current legal debate in two ways: it presents agroecology as a framework capable of guiding and assessing law and regulation and illustrates, via a study of EU pesticide regulation, how this framework can be deployed in practice to evaluate legal frameworks.

There has been a turn to fundamental rights in environmental and climate cases before national and international courts in recent years. We know very little whether there has been such a turn in relation to European Union (EU) law before the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). The CJEU occupies an increasingly relevant position in this nexus between environmental law and human rights because of strong and effective EU enforcement mechanisms, the abundance of specific EU secondary environmental law, the growing role of fundamental rights since 2009 and the self-standing provision on the environment in Article 37 of the Charter. An analysis of the case law, nonetheless, shows that Charter rights that can be used as ‘swords’ in the interest of environmental protection have so far played only a limited role. After explaining the absence of a rights turn, we argue that such a turn is warranted before the CJEU as well, also from a legal perspective. This article examines two potential avenues. The CJEU can derive positive obligations from relevant Charter provisions, including Articles 2 (right to life) and 7 (right to respect for private life and the home) of the Charter, or it can rely more extensively on Article 37 as a tool for interpreting primary and secondary EU law in an environmentally friendly way.

The preliminary reference procedure is today the ‘infringement procedure of the European citizen’. Although it was initially designed as a mechanism for judicial cooperation, the procedure soon became an instrument for supranational judicial review of national legislation. Such a discrepancy between the intended role of the preliminary reference procedure and its actual use in practice has important consequences that are yet to be fully explored in the literature. Indeed, how can the Court of Justice appropriately review national legislation through a procedure designed for interpreting EU law? Is the procedure governing the preliminary reference mechanism suitable to perform such a role? In this paper, we focus on one issue in particular: the way in which the Court of Justice gains information regarding the legal and factual background of the case. The Court has long recognised that appropriate knowledge of the factual and legal context of the referred case is a necessary prerequisite to performing its scrutiny and that, in accordance with the judicial cooperation model, such information is provided by the national judge. The Article critically examines the rules of procedures and the case law to show that the national judge certainly plays a key role, but other actors contribute to shaping the Court’s knowledge too. After an analysis of each actor’s role, the Article concludes that the procedure offers few guarantees as to the effective participation of individual parties to the advantage of other actors in the proceedings, increasing the risk of having partial or unbalanced information regarding the legal and factual background of the cases.

In Locke’s philosophy money is ‘naturalised’ and thus ostensibly removed from political contestation. Locke has been criticised for marginalising monetary politics, and thus downplaying the conventional character of money that could potentially allow for democratic monetary reform. Drawing on Marx’s writings, this paper shows that money is indeed a social convention, but its inherent economic functioning restricts its susceptibility to political contestation. There are limits to the democratic reform of money in a capitalist economy that spring from money’s own nature.

Specifically, the politics of money is rooted in the tension between money as measure of value and money as unit of account. The state draws political power from setting the unit of account, but the measurement of value occurs spontaneously among commodity producers, thereby generating tension that curbs monetary politics. In contemporary conditions, this is typified by central banks having the freedom to manage the unit of account but subject to heavy economic constraints rooted in value measurement. In this light, democratic monetary reform requires restricting the spontaneous measurement of value, thus intervening at the heart of the capitalist economy. For money to be democratic it needs to have a much narrower range of economic functioning.

This Article aims to elucidate servitisation through the lens of Hegel’s personality theory, which justifies property based on its role in shaping our identity. The growing prominence of servitisation enables us to interact with and derive benefits from things not only through ownership but also through contractual access. In this light, it is submitted that the personality justification offers a helpful theoretical framework to inform a clearer conception of servitisation, which in turn sheds illuminating light on its effective legal shaping and regulation. Through the lens of personality theory, I argue that long-term servitisation is functionally equivalent to formal property in promoting the actualisation of personhood, while the short-term counterpart supports the experimentation of personality. The relational nature of Hegelian property is reinforced in servitisation. Accordingly, a functional approach to property lends itself to the proper regulation of servitisation, where contracts could be employed to set out the governance framework for servitised property. Legal regulation on servitisation should play both protective and facilitative roles in the servitised economy.

A wind of change is blowing through the European judicial landscape. During the past decade, the European Union (EU) judiciary has undergone its biggest institutional overhaul in generations, the rise of authoritarian populism in Central and Eastern Europe has prompted a Rule of Law crisis, several supreme and constitutional courts challenged the supremacy of EU law, while the Court of Justice re-articulated the scope of the duty to refer under Article 267 TFEU and, for the first time, found that domestic last-instance courts breaching it triggered state liability. This Article argues that these and similar developments, once looked at together, suggest that something fundamental has shifted in the EU’s judicial architecture. A new form of judicial federalism has emerged, which departs from the traditional way in which relations between EU and Member State courts used to be structured. Although this new federalism is multifaceted and is marked by both centripetal and centrifugal forces, its distinguishing feature is a stronger centralisation, which manifests itself in a considerably expanded federal judiciary, a greater emphasis on hierarchy, a more careful use of European judicial resources, as well as tighter supervision of national procedures and court structures.

The general principle of effective judicial protection grants the right to obtain a remedy in the fields covered by EU law and is an essential component of the EU enforcement toolkit. Recent jurisprudential developments have complexified the role of this principle, by transforming it into a vehicle for the enforcement of the rule of law in the EU. As a result, the principle of effective judicial protection appears as the factotum of the EU legal system: it acts as a fundamental right and is an expression of the EU rule of law; furthermore, it is a legal basis to influence national fundamental rights and to impose procedural obligations on the EU institutions. This overview Article offers a novel account of the evolution of this principle in the EU legal landscape. First, it reflects on the trajectory of this evolving principle in the EU case law and in the academic discourse. Second, it identifies conceptual issues surrounding the role of effective judicial protection in the EU legal order in the light of the latest jurisprudential developments.

Today’s world is less stable than the Cold War international system. Why didn’t the high expectations for a peaceful world materialise that existed 30 years ago? This Article singles out two interrelated trends that stem from mistakes made when it seemed that humanity, having learned from history, was entering a period of the ‘end of history’. This forms the very basis for today’s negative tendencies to flourish. The triumphant West tried to unify the whole world under one leadership and to make it uniform. Yet, the world is simply too big, complex and diverse for only one ideology, be it Judeo-Christian, Anglo-Saxon, Confucian, Muslim or secular liberal-democratic, to dominate. Therefore, those states that couldn’t or didn’t want to follow Washington, began to claim their own place and the right to go their own way. Until it is recognised that there is a value in acceptance of diverse ways of life within a society and in the existence of diverse political systems, economic models and societal arrangements, there will not be even a relative peace in the world. Equally, recognition and acceptance of balance of power in international relations is even more important than the adherence to the principle of separation of powers within states. The second trend is expressed in conflicts between elites and masses, whose grievances are exploited by populists. The idea that globalisation would lead, if not to the disappearance of the State, then at least to a considerable shrinking of its role, turned out to be wrong.

This paper aims at discussing the historical trajectory of European money and the way it can be illuminated through a dialogue with Stefan Eich’s The Currency of Politics. Fleshing out the different theories, visions, and conceptualisations of money in Eich’s book, this paper utilises this exposition to evaluate the development and operationalisation of European money. With an eye to contemporary debates about the re-politicisation or democratisation of money, the paper will critically assess the way in which Eich’s account can be used as a framework to explain European money.

This symposium analyses European Union (EU) law as a means for both perpetuating commodification processes and potentially mitigating their consequences. This issue framing essay traces the evolutionary trajectory of commodification as a conceptual framework in contemporary intellectual debates, zeroing in on the most prominent theoretical frameworks underpinning its usage. It then relates the evolution of these debates more concretely to the context of the EU as a major institutional forum for the concept’s actualisation. Lastly, it connects these narratives to current conversations on the law’s role in constituting capitalism and consolidating its attendant structural inequalities. In so doing, it also canvasses the contributions that make up this symposium, showing how each enhances the discussion of commodification in the EU context.

This short introduction to the symposium on Christodoulidis’s The Redress of Law highlights the reasons why the book will be relevant to readers interested in EU law. First, EU law is the main body of positive law by reference to which the author develops his argument. In the process, he offers a critical assessment of the state of EU law, which has played a key role as the main vehicle of the neoliberalisation of the legal systems of the Member States of the EU. Second, some of the key concepts elaborated and sharpened by the author can be used to build up a critical theory of EU law. This is illustrated by considering how a critical theory of the history of EU law could be written, and by showing that Christodoulidis offers us the elements with which to reconstruct how EU got transformed from the 1970s through the reverse engineering of some of the key institutions and substantive norms of democratic political constitutionalism.

The aim of this contribution is to critically introduce and assess the Frankfurt School’s theory of late capitalism as it emerged in the 1970s, when a combined crisis of inflation and stagnation began to unravel the Keynesian orthodoxies of state-organised capitalism. In the process, Frankfurt theorists such as Jürgen Habermas and Claus Offe developed powerful critiques of commodification and juridification. The origins of their theory of late capitalism are first traced to the interwar debates on the Weimar Constitution – Germany’s first experiment in both constitutional and economic democracy. The rest of the Article takes a closer look at the Frankfurt School’s changing posture towards economic democracy in the 1970s. Accordingly, I first reiterate how the theory of late capitalism converged with that of the other major crisis theory of the time – the neo-conservative theory of ‘ungovernability’. In diagnosing the ‘governability crisis’ as a crisis of democracy, the Frankfurt School’s increasing pessimism about democracy’s economic reach becomes apparent. Secondly, by looking at the way the Frankfurt School perceived the emergence of the ‘neoliberal’ alternative in the early 1980s, I also argue that the theory of late capitalism had, and did, little to resist the de-democratisation of the economy through the rise of economic constitutionalism in the 1980s. As the welfare state was caught between the two logics of commodification and juridification, economic democracy was its unwitting victim.

This response gives me the opportunity to clarify, extend, and complement several aspects of my conceptual and historical argument in The Currency of Politics. I do so primarily by situating my account more explicitly within debates over European monetary politics, by expanding on my use of history, and by articulating what differentiates my concern with the political theory of money and the politics of depoliticisation from complementary accounts. In doing so I elaborate on the ways in which engagement with the thought of John Maynard Keynes helped to structure my approach. While there are important limits to the politics of money under contemporary capitalism, these limits are not fixed economic ones but are better seen as political limits of monetary politics that nonetheless leave considerable space for articulating alternative demands for more democratic forms of money. This framing allows me to extend my argument in order to address contemporary struggles over credit policy, monetary reform, and climate change in Europe. I thus end with a set of critical reflections on the constitutional status of money in the European project and beyond.

In his monograph The Redress of Law, Emilios Christodoulidis provides a sophisticated genealogical study of the emergence of total market thinking in Europe. With market constitutionalism having sidelined political constitutionalism, the potential of law to organise the political community is significantly restricted. By examining the commodification of labour, processes of bargaining, unemployment, and strikes, Christodoulidis demonstrates the destructive consequences of law in the service of market rationalities as well as its potential for strategic action to build collective identity in the EU (European Union).

Yet, I argue that this book comes with two significant blind spots, namely a dated understanding of both law and labour. First of all, Christodoulidis’s systems theoretical understanding of law is neglecting the material conditions that law continuously re-produces in the course of globalization. Secondly, his vision of labour remains rather traditional, focused on unionised, white, and male workers. Both elements are central pillars of his analysis but do not reflect the current reality of the 21st century. In this Article, I challenge his conceptualization by situating his work in recent research on the role of law and labour regulation in global capitalism.

The debate on the posting of workers in the European Union (EU) shows no sign of resolution 15 years after the controversial Laval quartet of judgements by the ECJ. The majority view has it that the judgements gave social dumping the backing of EU law, thus undermining national achievements in the social sphere. From this perspective the 2018 Revised Posted Workers Directive is a step in the right direction. The critique from the periphery, on the other hand, alleges that what looks like social dumping from the centre amounts to equality of opportunity for workers of the periphery, thus seeing the judgements in a more ambiguous or even positive light. The Revised PWD is here seen as a reassertion of national dominance from the EU’s centre. In this paper I engage with Christodoulidis’s constitutional approach to this complex problem which he develops in The Redress of Law, arguing against his embrace of the majority position in Part 3 of his work while building on his radical democratic proposals from Part 4. From the latter’s perspective, both the majority view as well as the critique from the periphery are to be rejected, since the very opposition between the two options is inimical to workers’ rights in the EU. Radical democratic action is necessary to overcome this impasse, to open the space within which rights and interests of workers from across the Union can be properly protected and advanced.

This paper offers a critique of European Union (EU) consumer law’s role in commodification. Arguing that commodification is best understood as a normatively dependent concept, it contrasts two very different strands of commodification critique. While teleological critique refers to conceptions of the good life, authenticity, or the corruption of human essence, deontological critique relies on conceptions of right and wrong, justice, and human dignity. The paper argues for a specific, Kantian–Marxian version of the latter, proposing to understand commodification as a moral wrong when it leads to legal–political alienation. Such legal–political alienation occurs when someone becomes disconnected or feels dissociated from the political community and its political institutions because its laws treat that person as a mere means, not also an end. The only way to overcome such alienating commodification, the paper argues, is through a dialectic of individual and collective self-determination. On this normative basis, the paper, then, critiques core instances where EU consumer law wrongs its addressees through alienating commodification, including its acceptance of personal data as consideration, its encouragement of consumer resilience, and its privatisation of social justice through ethical consumerism.