What is the societal relevance?

The question of whether and how the European Union should contribute to the approximation of laws at Member State level is pivotal for 2016. This year will be remembered by history as the year when the United Kingdom held a referendum on the question of staying in the European Union, and its people answered in the negative. A lot can be said about the reasons leading to this monumental decision, and the extent to which private law harmonisation played a role is rather speculative at this point. However, what private law harmonisation and Brexit – as the unfortunate fall-out was named – have in common is the discussion of sovereignty. Where can one draw a line between EU interference and national legitimacy in decision-making? As it has been seen in this study, the European Commission has been pushing consumer protection trends that are purely normative, such as the maximum harmonisation standard. The data that European institutions use to justify these measures are scarce at best, and they fail to show any form of policy assessment. What has been achieved with minimum and maximum harmonisation? The Commission might have held consultations with a limited number of stakeholders, but do the preferences explained therein, which do not fully support maximum harmonisation, reflect better standards when applied to the internal market?

To a certain extent, these questions can and have been answered by means of doctrinary research. Nevertheless, the picture illustrated by doctrinary research is incomplete without an empirical assessment of minimum and maximum harmonisation. This is exactly what the present research results aimed to contribute to. The goal of creating the Convergence Index has been to open the floor to a wider debate on this matter. As indicated in the manuscript, the Index, as compiled here, is only a beta version, as it can and will be improved through subsequent research, to better reflect the factors it wishes to measure.

To whom are your research results of interest?

The findings in this manuscript are addressed to a wide array of stakeholders, from academics to policy-makers. One the one hand, as mentioned just above, the debate as to how to better measure the converging effects of harmonisation can be continued in the academic community, in an attempt to fine-tune a tool such as the Convergence Index, or create spin-offs.