In March 2000, the Lisbon European Council agreed upon a new strategic goal for the European Union: to become the “most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world, capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion.” One decade and the sobering experience of a global economic crisis later, the European Commission's new 2020 Strategy sets out a vision of Europe's social market economy for the 21st century that “shows how the EU can emerge stronger from the economic crisis and how it can be turned into a smart, sustainable and inclusive economy delivering high levels of employment, productivity and social cohesion.” If somewhat more modest in its targets, Europe 2020 reiterates the guiding ambition to enhance the EU's economic performance in the internal and global market that already dominated the Lisbon strategy. The lesson learned from Europe's “lost decade” is that the EU needs to replace the “slow and largely uncoordinated pace of reforms” with a “sustainable recovery” in order to regain its competitiveness, boost its productivity, and put it on “an upward path of prosperity.” This is, then, the EU's first “Lisbon” agenda that heavily relies on the internal market and that depicts social inclusion and political stability as conditioned upon further European economic integration. The recipe to defy what has grown from a “merely” economic crisis into a social and political crisis of the Union and its Member States is a combination of “smart,” “sustainable,” and “inclusive” growth.

Some years back, Philip Alston argued that processes of globalization, such as the privatization of state functions and the deregulation of private power, while purportedly value-neutral, have “acquired the status of values in and of themselves.” The market is increasingly seen as “the most efficient and appropriate value-allocating mechanism.” As a consequence, human rights become subjected to a litmus test of their “market-friendliness.” As Alston puts it:

Why do fundamental rights and market freedoms attract and repel each other? Why can they neither be together nor remain separate? This paper argues that at least part of the explanation is that they are each governed by different types of “logic.” They are at the fault-lines of different discourses. Market freedoms are promoted in a technological discourse, fundamental rights in a teleological discourse. The former are expressed in an observational view from above, while the latter embody the view of a first-person agent. Travelling back and forth between these two discourses, as legal authorities like the European legislator and the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) often have to do, is an ambiguous enterprise. It may create opacity, but it may also bring clarity to the otherwise muddy waters of a “common” (now: “internal”) EU market under capitalist conditions. Much is dependent on their ability to orientate themselves on a map that recognizes the poles of these discourses, technology and teleology. This paper contributes to drawing that map through analysis of a case study in patent law involving the concept of an embryo. Construed as “an autonomous concept of European law” the notion of an embryo will appear to be paradigmatic of alternative ways in which the two discourses may relate to each other.

According to Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union, the European Union is a political and economic union founded on a respect for fundamental rights and the rule of law, referred to hereafter as EU fundamental values. The central place of this commitment in the EU Treaties suggests a founding assumption: That the EU is a Union of states who themselves see human rights and the rule of law as irrevocable parts of their political and legal order. Reminiscent of the entry of Jorg Haider's far-right Freedom Party into the Austrian government in 2000, the events of 2012 have done much to shake that assumption; questioning both how interwoven the rule of law tradition is across the present-day EU, and the role the EU ought to play in policing potential violations of fundamental rights carried out via the constitutional frameworks of its Member States. Much attention in this field, much like the focus of this paper, has been placed on events in one state in particular: Hungary.

In the current European social and political climates there is much focus on forming the European Union into a more integrated, sustainable, and globally competitive economic market. This ideology is especially reflected in the aims of the EU 2020 agenda. With regards to these economic goals, it is very important that European law protects the economic freedoms of all participants in the internal market. Considering the alternative and concurrent 2020 goals of social integration, social cohesion, and human rights protection, EU law is also bound to protect the rights of workers and the public interest.

The controversial decisions of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in the quartet of cases that are grouped under its “Laval/Viking jurisprudence” are rapidly becoming entrenched as a key dimension of the European Union (EU) constitutional imaginary. This comes with a certain “immunization” against challenge as they become much harder to treat as mistakes. In their elevated status they have aligned stances and expectational structures. They have also had significant impact on the “Nordic” models; Charles Woolfson shows, for example, how subsequent to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) decision, the rulings of the Swedish Labour court has “seem[ed] to confirm that the ‘Swedish model' has, at the very least, been significantly redefined, if not fundamentally altered, in the light of Laval.” While EU lawyers largely sit it out in relative passivity, wondering what the fuss is really about, labor lawyers have been vocal in their disagreement. But the latter's voices in this debate—if we can call it such—have in turn been drowned out by the ululations of lawyers and theorists from the “new,” post-2004, EU countries loudly proclaiming a victory against the arrogance of the older Member States. If the workers of the Baltic states want to sell their labor—and their life—cheap, goes the “inclusionary” argument, why should they be constrained from doing so under protectionist regulatory policies that undercut their competitive advantage by those unwilling to rein in the exclusionary structures of social protection that limit access and opportunity for their workforce to join the Continent-wide economy? The massive impact that the decisions have had on the regulation of industrial relations in the countries of the European Union and on the position of the trade unions has hardly been ameliorated by the debacle that was the rapid withdrawal of the proposed Monti II Regulation in the face of resistance to it by national parliaments.

All nationals of a Member State are Union citizens, and so, in principle, these citizens fall within the scope of European Union (EU) law ratione personae. However, the protection of European citizenship status (ECS) is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for enjoying European citizenship rights (ECRs). In order to bring a case within its jurisdiction, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) should also ascertain what the link is between ECRs and the scope of EU law (ratione materiae). Recently, the CJEU ruled that securing the “genuine enjoyment of the substance of the rights attaching to the status of European Union citizenship” is a sufficient condition to bring a case within the scope of EU law. This new formula challenges the traditional cross-border test: by referring to “genuine enjoyment,” it entails rethinking the CJEU's current practice of depicting the conditions under which a citizenship case should be considered ratione personae and ratione materiae within the scope of EU law. Importantly, the interpretative crux of this new formula concerns whether the Court has really opted for an innovative test of its jurisdiction, which may detach the protection of ECRs from the current exercise of fundamental freedoms. This paper critically maps out how the CJEU has gradually strengthened both the protection of the ECS and the protection of rights attaching to such status. It argues that the Court has recognized that the de facto exercise of fundamental freedoms is not the only way to establish a link between a EU citizenship case and the scope of EU law. On the contrary, the Court ruled that Art. 20 TFEU (on Union citizenship and European citizenship rights) can be invoked by Union citizens, even if they have never exercised their free movement rights, in order to challenge national measures, which “deprive citizens of the Union of the genuine enjoyment of the substance of the rights conferred by virtue of their status as citizens of the Union.” This interpretative move raises the question whether the new test concerning the substance of the rights attaching to the status of European citizens enhances the protection of fundamental freedoms, by also safeguarding the potential exercising of these freedoms in the future, or whether it calls for including the actual protection of fundamental rights (such as the right to respect family life) in the so-called “substance” of European citizenship rights. This paper argues that the Court's present approach indicates that the former is the case, casting doubts on the central position of fundamental rights with regards to European citizenship.

In a recent article, Sobotka and Vermeersch chart the development of EU policy-making towards the Roma. Their analysis of EU documents and policy initiatives tells a convincing tale: Since 2007, Roma have shifted from being an external issue—connected to Enlargement conditionality—to being a high-priority on the EU's internal agenda, and from being the subjects of an approach focused on minority rights to one of social inclusion. This change in emphasis towards the Roma can be viewed in the light of a wider reorientation of the European Union, in which the primarily economic language of European integration is moderated by a shift towards viewing economic growth and social cohesion as mutually conditioning and sustaining. This is reflected in the 2020 Strategy in the language of “smart, sustainable and inclusive growth,” as well as in the notion of a “social market economy” and in the proliferation of social rights at the EU level. This reorientation has primarily been viewed to date through the lens of the increased prominence given to fundamental rights protection in the post-Lisbon Union, and the conflict that this creates with the Union's traditional fundamental freedoms. However, this shift is not exhausted by the greater emphasis on fundamental rights protection; rather, the commitment to inclusive growth has been interpreted by the Commission as requiring the integration of Roma into the economic and social orders of the Member States.

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the changing character of the European Union (“EU”) public order under the impact of security concerns. The EU public order has long been characterized by a tension between a more market-oriented, neo-liberal Union and a more socio-political Union. The former would be driven by the EU's four fundamental freedoms, whereas the latter would be achieved and safeguarded through the language and practice of fundamental rights. As other scholarly contributions to the issue have demonstrated, the relationship between fundamental freedoms and fundamental rights is anything but settled. It continues to be subject to many, sometimes potent, legal and political controversies. However, while the EU public order is still in pursuit of the right balance between economic freedoms and socio-political rights, it also has to reckon with another fundamental value: The value of security.

Until recently, throughout the European Union's integration process, public order and internal security matters have been marked by a concern and respect for the national sovereignty of the EU Member States. Member States enjoyed their respective regulatory autonomy, as public order and internal security matters were dealt with at the EU level merely on the basis of the internal market logic. This is particularly evident in Articles 45(3) and 52 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU). These Articles establish the exceptions of public policy and public security as grounds that may be invoked by the Member States to limit the fundamental right to free movement. These grounds have been primarily viewed as deriving from impediments to the creation of the common market.