Introduction

As demonstrated in the last chapters, through its early rulings in Van Gend en Loos and Costa v. ENEL the Court of Justice (ECJ) had created a European economic constitution. It was revolutionary in the sense that, through this constitution, a unique legal system was created which proved to be a powerful means of pushing forward liberalisation and economic integration. The famous cases Viking, Laval and Rüffert, however, demonstrated the inability of this constitution to defend social norms in the same manner and raised the question as to whether and how the EU’s economic dimension can be realigned with a social one. This chapter explores this issue taking a different field as a starting point: European company law. It is an area in which harmonisation attempts are nearly as old as Van Gend en Loos and the academic discussions even older. While the clear objective of company law is to support profit maximisation, another goal is to regulate the diverging interests between shareholders, managers, creditors and employees. In the EU, several national models exist which afford different degrees of influence and levels of safeguards to those constituencies. Whilst the German approach of a social market economy provides more influence to employees, the Anglo-Saxon liberal model in the UK grants more power to shareholders. European company law is therefore required to incorporate these contrasting social and economic approaches.