This symposium brings together a group of legal scholars who participated in a research project called European Society. The project originates in a meeting of the two of us and a mutual engagement with our texts. In 2022, Loïc Azoulai published a short piece on ‘The Law of European Society’ in the Common Market Law Review. The same year, Armin von Bogdandy published a book under the title Strukturwandel des öffentlichen Rechts. Entstehung und Demokratisierung der europäischen Gesellschaft (Suhrkamp), translated in English as The Emergence of European Society through Public Law (Oxford University Press 2024). At the time of publication, we were unaware of each other’s work – evidence, perhaps, that the theme was in the air. Owing to our differences in orientation and style, we decided to set up a research group, with the aim of providing a new account of the experience of Europe in the current context, marked by disorientation and polarisation, but also widely shared calls for ‘more Europe’. Europe’s current condition and its future possibilities are deeply affected by what many have classified as ‘crises’ (financial and economic crisis, migration, rule of law, external threats), but also what some Europeans even experience as ‘catastrophes’ (climate change, digital revolution, pandemic, war). The original idea was that the concept of ‘European society’ might help to get a better picture of the Europeans’ situation as well as ideas for the future course.

The European constitutional navigation of the noughties succeeded to stipulate that European integration had ushered European society (Article 2 TEU). This choice remains underexplored. In light of current European uncertainty, the contribution explores meaning and promise of European society. The concept can counter the Europeans’ incomprehension of their union by integrating their heterogeneous European experiences into one familiar notion. It shows their conflicts as normal and possibly productive, occurring in one society rather than between discrete Member States. It suggests to understand their democracy as a principled struggle for compromise. Not least, European society substantiates the EU’s new principled constitutionalism that goes against excesses of the ‘will-of-the-people’ approach.

European studies have traditionally relied on the power of broad concepts to account for the experience of the European Union: be it integration, governance, market, or legal order. Many of these concepts originated in social sciences. Yet, one concept is conspicuously absent from this list: ‘society’ was seen as ill-suited for picturing European integration. This background makes the recent and pervasive return of the term ‘society’ in the EU institutional discourse even more apparent. The paper attempts to propose a framework within which to think of the EU and its law in terms of European society makes sense. First, it argues that this turn to society is a response to challenges posed to the core assumptions upon which EU law has been predicated. Secondly, it inquiries about the sort of society produced by the law of European society. Thirdly, it suggests a new development for EU law and EU legal studies, integrating in their technical and conceptual appartuses additional resources and critical knowledge drawon from social sciences and social theory.

The question to what extent EU law is constitutive of European society as articulated in Article 2 TEU is, at its core, a question about the nature, scope and limits of EU law. This article suggests certain clear limits to EU law’s ability to make the European society visible in law, or legible for law – let alone composable through law. The article is entitled ‘Is this Europe?’ as a direct challenge to the widely held belief that EU law is somehow constitute of European integration; that EU law contains all that European integration is, can and will be. Sure, the Europe that we see when analysing cases, treaties and legislation matters. But the ‘real’ Europe – the one that is felt, experienced, lived – resides in what happens due to, in spite, or irrespective of those cases, treaties and legislation. For EU law to remain sensitive to its society, then, EU law needs to reformulate the expectations it has of itself and create an analytical framework that allows it to transcend its immanent nature. This requires three changes to the way we ‘do’ EU law. First, more sensitivity to the material and relational context in which EU law operates. Second, creating space for forms of lay knowledge that are rooted in social praxis. Third, more ambition and playfulness in the way we – as scholars – ‘speak’ EU law.

In the particular world of contemporary EU law, European society has the meaning of a place. Appreciating this requires considering the relationship between European society and another key concept, that of EU values. This relationship is one of mutual balance but also tension: while the latter are abstract calls for offensive action on the part of EU institutions, the former is identified as a concretely located space that must be preserved and defended. The paper begins with a close textual reading of Article 2 TEU, focusing on the provision’s specific architecture. There, European society appears as a singular reality – that of a concretely situated perimeter of social relations that the EU claims as its own – which pre-exists the EU’s institutionality and enables its foundational commitments to the realisation of a series of values. The second and most important part of the paper then contends that this particular arrangement should be understood as a function of the EU’s evolving external ambitions and self-positioning vis-à-vis the outside world. Thus, contrary to the common tendency to see the EU’s external projections as resulting from its own internal identity and dynamics, I will argue that here it is the internal that follows the external. On this basis, it will be shown that the complementary relationship between European society (as place) and EU values (as action) that I identified in the architecture of Article 2 TEU is reflective of the delicate compromise between the rise of the EU’s neo-imperial ambitions at the regional and global levels (for which values serve as a vehicle) and the construction of an increasingly hard boundary between an inside and an outside to the EU order (which the concept of European society serves to draw, justify and implement).

This article examines the constitutional imagination of European policymakers and legal scholars in the 20th and 21st centuries who participated in key treaty drafting processes that led to the listing of a series of values central to Europe’s identity in the 2012 Treaty on the European Union (TEU) and the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, which established the League of Nations – or Société des Nations (SDN) –and the International Labour Organization (ILO). Based on this historical comparison, the article argues that the concept of a European ‘society’ characterised by a specific set of what I call ‘social-democratic values’ (listed in Article 2 of the TEU) should be read in continuity with the 20th-century civilizational project of modern international law scholars who shaped the working of the SDN in the interwar era. Many international legal scholars close to the SDN were inspired by the French sociological school and social-democratic ideals: they anchored the working of international legal rules on the solid rock of an ‘international society’ marked by a series of values which seemed ‘modern’ in the sense that they reflected the emergence of a ‘society of individuals’ whose freedom and social rights went beyond those granted by sovereign states at the time. When seen against this historical background, the introduction in Article 2 of the TEU of a concept of ‘society’ characterised by such social-democratic values, such as pluralism, non-discrimination, tolerance, justice, solidarity and equality between women and men, to ground the EU’s constitutional order, betrays less the influence of contemporary sociological thinkers on the EU constitutional framers, than that of socio-legal theories developed by interwar scholars who wanted to modernise the operations of European colonialism and internationalism.

Who is recognised within the concept of ‘European Society’, and, more importantly, who or what remains unseen? This article critically examines European Society through a decolonial lens, arguing that EU law is detached from the lived and diverse realities of European Society. Drawing on the work of sociologist Manuela Boatcă, the authors propose a decolonial approach that excavates coloniality of power, knowledge and, especially, belonging within EU law to reimagine European Society. Analysing cases in migration and the rule of law, the article reveals how EU law perpetuates hierarchical structures of inclusion and exclusion, and invisibilises the liminal—often deploying “Western” norms, values, and lifestyles as gatekeeping tools, especially in post-colonial contexts. At the heart of this argument is the necessity to move beyond Eurocentric assumptions of universality, neutrality, and totality in legal scholarship, instead embracing plurality of perspective, creolisation, and reflexivity. The authors contend that European Society should not be treated as a rigid legal construct but rather as a dynamic and inclusive one that amplifies marginalised voices, acknowledges and accounts for the liminal, and critically examines the law’s inherent limitations. Ultimately, the article calls for a radical reimagining of European Society through its decolonisation—one that confronts historical injustices, disrupts entrenched power structures, and steers EU law toward a more just, equitable, accountable and reconstructive future.

This article conceptually and empirically explores the Interwar Era’s variant of the ‘electoral authoritarian’ regime-type, relying on a unique recategorisation of all Central and Eastern European states to systematically classify non-democratic regimes between the two World Wars. Modern electoral authoritarian regimes are notable for combining the ‘standard model’ of electoralist structural features common to contemporary democracy with identifiably authoritarian political orders. Electoralist regimes of the period were distinct from those of today, with a greater emphasis on anti-political dominant parties, the inheritance of 19th century-style parliamentarism in terms of both institutional and political culture, and a reliance on unaccountable apex executives who nevertheless allowed authoritarian forms of multiparty politics. The article also introduces the era’s primary alternative for institutionalized regimes that do not fit the simple label of traditional dictatorship or electoral authoritarianism: the ‘institutional-hierarchical’ model. This characterizes innovations in corporatist-style economic and sectoral representation, as well as explicitly top-down, non-electoralist authoritarian constitutional structures and mobilized, single-party institutions. The article reviews all Interwar regimes in the region, providing alternative regime conceptualizations, exploratory classifications, and an illustrative case-study of Poland’s post-1926 Interwar style electoral authoritarian regime, highlighting both the survival of older electoralist models alongside a growing movement towards both more personalist and institutional-hierarchical formats by the 1930s.

This article is focused on uncovering how authoritarian legal scholars in interwar Poland dealt with the issue of the ‘sovereign’. In most democratic constitutions, the ‘people’ are said to be sovereign. In a monarchy, the monarch is the sovereign. However, in an authoritarian system, the source of power can be much more vague. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Polish legal scholars and politicians began designing a constitution that would solidify power gained after a 1926 coup d’etat. The ultimate result was a constitution ratified in April 1935 using strong-arm tactics. I argue that the 1935 constitution’s main authors used a unique combination of neo-monarchism and ‘social solidarism’ to justify a legal revolution. The first replaced democratic sovereignty with monarchism, embodied in a president who metaphysically represented the Polish nation. The other justified a socio-political system based on the principle that unity of the whole was more important than individual freedom. Thus they arrived at an authoritarianism that was both legal and ‘legitimate’. At the end of the article, I show the legacies of this thinking in the post-World War II communist era. Stalinist legal scholars in Poland used precisely the same language from the 1930s to justify the introduction of a new constitution in 1952.

This paper argues that to liberal authoritarianism – defined here as a liberal technique of government fusing authoritarianism with liberalism for the purpose of the ‘free market’, following Hermann Heller – corresponds a form of dual constitutionalism or fragmented legality. Dual constitutionalism, originally a colonial technique of governance, relies on a liberal constitution enshrining a state of exception which suspends it on specific matters, territories, and during certain times. It can be either military – called in France the ‘state of siege’, the continental version of the British Martial Law – or civilian – the ‘state of emergency’. In the case of France, liberal authoritarianism has witnessed several declinations since the French Revolution, flourishing in the liberal colonialism of the late 19th century, then the full-fledged liberal authoritarianism of the interwar period, and eventually in the neoliberal authoritarianism of the 4th and 5th republic. Focusing on the relationship between France and its Algerian colony during the Third Republic (1870–1940), one of the most liberal periods ever in French history, it documents how the State of Exception was used to establish a legalised state of dictatorship where all executive, legislative and judicial powers were vested in the hands of a governor, in order to force the creation of markets by breaking down collective land ownership and use and other non-liberal economic customs of the local population, using, in particular, the legal tool of the ‘sequestre’ which allowed the State to forcibly expropriate land and seize assets of the local population without compensation, forced labour and internment camps – all in order to incentivise ‘free enterprise’ by the colonisers. Many of these legal tools and techniques migrated back to the metropolis when the Third Republic officially dissolved into a Nazi State in 1940, through legal means and in accordance with the constitutional procedures of the Third Republic.

This article seeks to capture the transformative potential of emergency powers, as a legal–political practice pertaining to liberal legality that ultimately can determine constitutional change, rather than a return to ‘normality’. It does so by providing an analysis of the transition from formal and limited liberal legality in Romania to the series of dictatorships that followed the instauration of the regime of royal dictatorship of King Carol II in 1938. Anchored in a close reading of the archival documents of the trial of the leader of the main far right movement, Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, and the subsequent legal proceedings, the proposed article aims to produce revaluation of the jurisprudential and constitutional status of the regime of King Carol II with a view of understanding the emergency-based dimension of this rule and the particular shift it operated foundational legal categories in criminal and constitutional law. I proceed by examining the current theoretical limitations in addressing the historical role of emergency in relation to constitutional orders. I turn then to exploring the political and legal context of the prorogation of emergency measures in 1938 Romania. Last, I examine the limited status of modern legality in a situation oversaturated by emergency measures.

This article examines the process of drafting the authoritarian Portuguese Constitution of 1933, which took place during the military regime. The aim is to identify the powers involved, their objectives and the strategies they developed, and to find insights that shed light on the adoption of constitutions by authoritarianisms. The results suggest that conflict between political forces is endemic to the constitutional process, and that those who hegemonise support and aim to demilitarise the system are able to impose the new constitution even without guaranteeing the existence of democratic political parties. There is also a promising point of analysis: the emergence of an authoritarian constitution is based on path dependence, ie, it has many links with the material constitutionalism that precedes it, where there are already normalised authoritarian elements.

I examine the transformation of Italy during the fascist era and the way in which it was explained by one of the most prominent constitutional lawyers of the time, Costantino Mortati (1891–1985). A member of the Constituent Assembly of 1946–1948 and later a constitutional judge, Mortati had a deep influence on the Italian post-War constitutional thinking. Here I focus on Mortati’s understanding of the state’s transformation after 1922. I show how he conceptualised Italy’s transition from a liberal state to an authoritarian regime as a shift from the parliament to the executive of the power of ‘political direction’, ie, the power of identification of the aims and values of the state. Mortati did not envisage in the Italian transformation the full erasure of the separation of powers, but rather a large reshuffle of political direction moving from the Parliament to the Head of Government, allegedly a process in line with the country’s needs in the 20th century. He read the growth of executive powers as the most enduring constitutional transformation of his time, one destined in his mind to persist even after the downfall of the regime.

Recent scholarship on the post-Habsburg world has highlighted the often ambiguous transitions between nineteenth-century empires and the Central European nation-states of the interwar period such as Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, Hungary, and Yugoslavia. In this vein, the article reconsiders how imperial legacies continued to inform the political cultures, administrative practices, and center-periphery relations, in one such contested periphery: Subcarpathian Ruthenia, the easternmost province of interwar Czechoslovakia. By examining Czechoslovak practices and policies toward the region, it interrogates whether Prague’s governance assumed a colonial character, as contemporary observers and strands of recent historiography have contended. Such accusations struck at the heart of Czechoslovakia’s interwar standing as Central Europe’s exemplary democracy. Rather than accepting or dismissing these charges at face value, the article advances an alternative interpretation by conceptualizing Czechoslovak state-building in Subcarpathian Ruthenia as “external democracy promotion”—a concept drawn from contemporary political science. This more differentiated assessment of the achievements and limitations of democratic governance in a nascent state’s periphery, as well as of the declared intentions and concrete practices of the historical actors, permits a more productive dialogue between past and present. It navigates beyond the pitfalls of presentism, but remains critically engaged with enduring questions of power, legitimacy, and democratic praxis regarding interwar Central Europe.

This article draws a legal portrait of President Lenaerts, in an attempt to critically examine both his description of the institution to which he belongs, and his influence upon it. It is based on a comprehensive study of his public and formalised statements (published or on podcasts) since the year of his election in 2015. Based on these research materials, this article examines the contextual elements of Lenaerts’ personality, career path, and the challenges currently facing the European Court of Justice. It also illustrates that Lenaerts is an exceptionally gifted legal mind, educated from his earliest years in Community law, with a career both shaped by and devoted to the Court. The article argues that, although Lenaerts remains publicly discreet about the Court’s internal organization, he nonetheless exerts a significant influence over its functioning and reform process. Furthermore, while Lenaerts publicly defends the idea of law as apolitical, he advances a normative vision of what EU law ought to be and asserts that its current form serves the interests of European citizens. Lenaerts is an influential President who skilfully leverages his scholarly authority to defend the Court and its jurisprudence, presented as coherent. Yet, his position is not without ambiguity, as he frequently shifts roles – scholar, citizen, or President – while defending a specific point. A significant part of his influence lies in the subtle gaps between his professed positions and his concrete actions, as well as between his dual role as scholar and as President—two interstices where institutional power is exercised less visibly, but no less effectively.