Economic and Social Conflicts, Integration and Constitutionalism in Contemporary Europe

Europe’s current constitutional landscape is marked by an underlying conflict between alternative strategies of integration related to different economic and social conflicts. Whereas constitutional structuring in the EU member states revolves around conflicts reminiscent of 19th and 20th Century class struggles, the constitutional framework of the EU may be traced back to conflicts concerning the transnational mobility of factors of production. Drawing on Smend’s theory of integration, the article compares the nature of the EU and states’ constitutional traditions investigating their respective circuits of personal, material and functional integration as well as their evolving mutual interactions. Against this backdrop, it is argued that the conflicts between Europe’s constitutional frameworks may be managed through decentralised institutional and interpretative practices inspired by the idea of convergence. Yet, on the basis of Fligstein’s empirical inquiry on the EU clash, Europe’s current constitutional setting may still be questioned as socially biased. Despite its high potential for legal integration, the system of governance resulting from the combination of the EU and states’ constitutional frameworks seems to perform poorly in terms of effective social integration and, namely, to allow for the silent prevarication of a narrow active EU transnational society over the more indifferent peoples living in Europe