The Neo-Liberal Bias of the EU Constitutional Order : A Critical Analysis, in Research Handbook on the Politics of Constitutional Law (Mark Tushnet, Dimitry Kochenov eds.), Edward Elgar forthcoming

The EU ‘economic constitution’ systematically biases EU policy making in a neo-liberal direction. Historically speaking, this was not the intent of the EU founding fathers. The original constitutional settlement of embedded liberalism was significantly redefined in the next major revisions of the Rome Treaty. The neo-liberal foundations of the single market and the EMU have imposed real and significant institutional constraints for progressive policy making. However, the role of the European progressives was equally important in this alteration of the EU constitutional order. Despite the strong neoliberal consensus among the key political actors of that time, such a change would have not be possible without the progressives' retreat towards »centre-leftism«, particularly in France. The euro crisis pushed these developments even further and, for the first time in the EU history, explicitly challenged the constitutional balance of the EU legal order. The new ‘Austerity Union’, a project in the making, profoundly altered this constitutional balance. Nevertheless, while the constraints of the EU economic constitution are significant, we should avoid the naturalization of the EU project. Instead of looking only at the structural aspect (the EU constitutional order), we have to take into account also the role of agency: the European progressives, while in power, failed to leave their lasting and distinct imprint on the EU economic constitution. Their policy agenda remained firmly embedded in the logic of the nation state. Last but not least, some more recent political and legal developments demonstrate that there is more flexibility in the EU constitutional order than allowed in the theory of the neoliberal bias of the EU constitutional order