You are here: Home
Understanding the Lisbon Treaty
Lisbon Treaty Q & A: your guide to what it means and what happens next
The General Framework or Primacy of the Social Dimension (Principles)
TOWARDS AN HUMAN-DEVELOPMENTAL INTERPRETATION OF THE EU’S ECONOMIC CONSTITUTION
The Economic Constitution under Pressure: The Impact of the Financial Crisis
The neoclassical turn taken by the EU in the 1990s and 2000s has had far-reaching consequences not just for labour law and social policy, but for the direction of economic policy more generally. The Court’s validation of the neoclassical constitution in Viking and Laval nevertheless came at a very late stage in the process of its diffusion, when its limits and contradictions were becoming clear. The judgments were handed down a few weeks after the beginning of the credit crunch of 2007 and within nine months of the onset of the global financial crisis in the autumn of 2008. Events, rather than theoretical refutations, shift paradigms and the idea of the self-equilibrating market has come under severe pressure following the near-collapse of the global financial system in September 2008. A major depression was averted only by the use of traditional Keynesian measures of fiscal expansion, and by the automatic stabilisers provided by welfare states and employment protection laws.31 Discredited ideas take a time to fade away, however, and as the immediate crisis passed, much of the impetus for policy reform was lost.
EU should not grant China MES until it becomes a market economy
'Social Market Economy' as Europe's Social Model?
How To Create A Real European Social Market Economy
The General Framework or Primacy of the Social Dimension (Principles)
The Lisbon Treaty, the Viking and Laval Judgments and the Financial Crisis: In Search of New Foundations for Europe’s ‘Social Market Economy’
The Shift From ‘Ordoliberal’ To ‘Neoclassical’ Conceptions Of The Market In EU Law
Ordoliberal Theory, the Rome Treaty and the Original ‘Social Market’ Economy
Viking/Laval and the Open Method of Coordination
Social policy has also moved on since the mid-1950s, but Viking and Laval are at odds with these more recent developments too. The most significant of them has been the application of the social policy of the regulatory techniques associated with open coordination methods. The open method of coordination (‘OMC’) is premised on the value of having, within the economic space of the internal market, a diverse range of regulatory approaches to policy issues. Within the parameters set by policy guidelines at the central level, Member States have leeway over the choice of mechanisms used to arrive at common goals.
WHAT ARE HUMAN RIGHTS? HUMAN RIGHTS DEFINED
Human Rights Topics for Upper Primary and Lower and Senior Secondary School
A human rights culture attempts to define principles for the positive conduct of all human behaviour. What follows are issues involved in realizing these principles. Although only a few activities are described for each issue, they should provide teachers with a start for developing their own activities. As some of these issues may prove to be controversial, the teacher’s sensitivity and discretion are required.
Teachers who want to concentrate on specific issues (e.g. peace and disarmament, world development, prisoners of conscience, minority peoples, anti-racism or antisexism) should present them in a human rights context. Students will then be able to see that what they discuss is only one aspect of a larger framework involving many other issues. This general understanding will provide breadth while the specific issue will provide depth. Teachers who specialize in different aspects of human rights should work side by side to provide understanding in depth.
What is Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty and why is it so vague?
What is Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty?
The Treaty of Lisbon: introduction - All Languages
The General Framework or Primacy of the Social Dimension (Principles)
The Lisbon Treaty, the Viking and Laval Judgments and the Financial Crisis: In Search of New Foundations for Europe’s ‘Social Market Economy’
The aim of these texts is to consider the relationship between the economic and social dimensions of European integration in the light of a number of recent legal and institutional developments, including the Viking and Laval judgments,1 the changes to EU law made by the Lisbon Treaty and the unfolding financial crisis. Viking and Laval, and the subsequent case law clarifying and extending those rulings, radically altered the nature of the relationship between social policy and internal market law by asserting that national labour law rules were liable, in and of themselves, to distort competition within the internal market, and as such had to be justified by reference to a strict test of proportionality. Prior to Viking and Laval, strong national labour law systems, setting standards above a basic floor of rights guaranteed by a combination of Treaty provisions and Directives, had been not just accepted, but actively encouraged as providing a counterweight to the effects of market integration. With the emergence of open coordination methods, differences in levels of regulation between systems had been seen as providing a basis for experimentation in the social policy field. By associating the application of the labour laws of the Member States with the concept of distortion of competition,Viking and Laval undermined these approaches to social policy and threatened to initiate a race to the bottom between national systems.2