EUROPEAN UNION WORLD

The Lisbon Treaty Explained

Values and Objectives of EU

Treaty of Lisbon values

Values and Objectives

Article 2 TEU on the Union’s values is not only a political and symbolic statement. It has concrete legal effects.1

To date, relatively little consideration has been given to the added value of the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe or the Lisbon Treaty with regard to what is generally called the ‘social dimension’ of the European Union.2 It needs to be viewed in conjunction with the two earlier parts of the Constitution and, at present, with Articles 2, 3 and 6 of the TEU. These provisions deal with the values and objectives of the Union and define how the Union relates to fundamental rights. The question is whether this new way of framing largely unchanged competences puts the social dimension of the European Union in a different light. In this contribution, I want to explore whether the distinction, as well as the relation between values and objectives, might provoke a shift in the ‘balance’ between fundamental (social) rights and fundamental economic freedoms.

The EU and human rights: a new era under the Lisbon treaty?

European development policy

YOUR GUIDE TO THE LISBON TREATY

The General Framework or Primacy of the Social Dimension (Principles)

TOWARDS AN HUMAN-DEVELOPMENTAL INTERPRETATION OF THE EU’S ECONOMIC CONSTITUTION

Human-developmental Goals and the Lisbon Treaty

To see labour law in developmental terms would by no means be an entirely novel approach in the context of EU social policy. Significant elements of the existing corpus of EU labour law can be understood using this model. The substantial body of equal treatment law which originated in the equal pay provisions of the Treaty of Rome and was later broadened to include a much wider range of prohibited grounds of discrimination provides one example.51 It is in this context that the use of the capability approach to justify a social rights-based interpretation of discrimination law has already entered the discourse of the Court.52 There is considerable scope for the further operationalization of the capability approach at the level of juridical analysis.

Lisbon Treaty

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.