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 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.

The notion of constitutional identity rests on a seemingly inevitable tension: it is seen both as a source of inclusive social cohesion and as a potentially exclusionary concept invoked to justify populist claims and divergent interpretations of the rule of law and human rights. This has led legal scholars to redirect the understanding of constitutional identity towards an exclusively legal and functional definition in line with the formulation of Article 4 (2) TEU, which protects the ‘national identities’ of the European Member States: identity is assured so far as it is inherent to the ‘fundamental structures, political and constitutional’ of the Member States. This contribution criticises this approach, because it ignores the dynamic nature of a community and its attachment to its ethnocultural affinities, possibly undermining the viability of an inclusive polity. This is a concern, especially for multinational communities like the European Union. It then proposes an alternative conception of constitutional identity as narrative identity, in which preconstitutional identity emerges as the ghost in the shell of constitutional identity. A narrative conception of constitutional identity bridges the civic/ethnic divide by giving ethnocultural elements a place through narrative integration of preconstitutional identities but avoids an illiberal logic by putting them forward according to a retrospective logic as projections rather than as a robust core. Starting from that narrative conception, the relationship between preconstitutional and constitutional identity is further clarified by investigating their interplay across six binaries that often recur in the debate: continuity/change, sameness/difference, unity/plurality, sameness/difference, fact/fiction, affect/ratio.

In the past decade or so, the text of the EU Treaties has stayed the same, yet their reading has undergone significant changes. The language of anti-formalism has triumphed over formalism, obviating the need for complex political debates and democratic processes inherent to actual Treaty revisions. This method of constitutional reinterpretation was ushered in by the NextGenerationEU and seems now, in the post-Draghi-Report world, the dominant way for the Commission to address its political priorities. This article explores the invisible side of constitutional change by legal engineering. It will examine the place of Treaty respect in the old vocabulary of EU law and discuss how the NGEU drove a wedge into this established vocabulary. The NGEU experiment demonstrates how reinterpretation of core Treaty provisions may provide solutions to immediate functional needs but tends to result in ill-functioning governance models that fail to provide a stable long-term basis for integration. Further, democratic participation, which lacks an established vocabulary in the EU legal language, is easily overlooked. Yet, it is the democratic process that breathes life into constitutional change. A constitution animated by political opportunism and technocratic reinterpretation rather than broader societal evolution is not a living constitution. At best, it is a puppet constitution, at worst, it is dead.

The ecological transition needs a shift in the definition of the role of the state from a market-correcting to a market-steering actor. This transformation inevitably reverberates within private law, whose institutions participate in distributing the social and economic burdens of sustainability policies. Focusing on the housing sector as a paradigmatic site of tension between environmental imperatives and social justice, the paper examines how measures aimed at improving the energy performance of buildings and promoting urban greening can generate regressive distributive effects, including rising housing costs, green gentrification, and heightened risks of indebtedness and displacement for vulnerable groups. Against this background, the paper argues that private law must be reconceptualised as a tool capable of mitigating these structural inequities.

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.

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.

This article brings to the debate on constitutional identity a category borrowed by feminist thought: patriarchy. Generally considered as a pre-existing identity, flushed out by a modern/progressive constitutional identity, this paper claims that patriarchy can be indirectly perpetuated by certain constitutional provisions if not differently interpreted. By focusing on the issue of the exclusion of women from the priesthood in some majoritarian religions spread in Europe, the paper observes that an effective impossibility of challenging this exclusion in front of a judge, due to the operation of the constitutional principle of religious freedom, creates a growing conflict with another constitutional principle: that of gender equality. The paper notes that this inner conflict between two core constitutional principles, both crucial to the Western constitutional identity, is overlooked by constitutional research and invites constitutionalists to self-reflect on the historical limits of the constitutions that were created by men, in states that often coalesced with religious institutions to assert patriarchy. The paper claims that the constitutional indifference toward the religious gap is no longer constitutionally sustainable in a context in which the EU says that there is no democracy without gender equality. The principle of religious freedom needs to be re-interpreted to readdress a historical injustice suffered by women in the long patriarchal process that excluded them from the sacred. Without imposing upon religion institutions by dictating their faith, the paper suggests some practical measures that can remedy the patriarchal harms suffered by women after they lost access to the altar.

This article suggests that the economically activist tendencies of the European Union are not just a temporary response to exogenous crises, but part of a long-term transformation of the EU into a governance structure that is increasingly equipped for forms of more direct rule over its territory, economy, and citizens, albeit still in an incomplete and contested manner. This transformation hinges on three interlocking processes that feed into each other and accelerate: (i) the rise of EU-level material, financial, and institutional infrastructure; (ii) the significant centralisation of EU power; and (iii) novel narrations about the ‘point’ of the EU that stabilise its authority. This transformation of the EU brings with it new challenges for its authority. Using the work by Charles Tilly, who focuses on the way in which trust networks are integrated in rule, this article distinguishes between the EU’s ability to rule by way of coercion, by way of capital and by way of commitment. It is suggested that while the EU’s ability to rule by way of coercion and capital have grown, it remains difficult to envisage how the EU may stably reproduce commitments structures that would allow it to transition into a stable and democratic structure of governance.

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.

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.

This paper examines the evolution and implications of ‘must-carry’ obligations in the regulation of online platforms, with a focus on Europe. These obligations, which restrict platforms’ discretion to remove or deprioritise certain content, represent a novel regulatory response to the growing power of platforms in shaping public discourse. The analysis traces developments at EU and national levels. At the EU level, it considers rejected must-carry proposals during the drafting of the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the adoption of Article 18 of the European Media Freedom Act (EMFA), which grants privileges to recognised media service providers. At the national level, it examines Germany’s prohibition on content discrimination, the UK’s Online Safety Act, and Poland’s abandoned legislative proposal on freedom of expression online. Case law from courts in the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, and Poland further illustrates the emergence of judicially crafted duties resembling must-carry obligations. The paper argues that these measures are best understood as special treatment rules that privilege particular speakers, notably media organisations and politicians, by limiting platform autonomy in content moderation. While intended to safeguard pluralism and access to trustworthy information, such rules risk creating a two-tier system of expression in which established voices receive disproportionate protection while ordinary users remain vulnerable. Protections for politicians raise concerns about shielding powerful actors from justified moderation, whereas media privileges, though more defensible, remain limited in scope and potentially counterproductive, especially when exploited by outlets disseminating disinformation. The conclusion is that compelled inclusion and preferential treatment are unlikely to offer sustainable solutions to the structural imbalances between platforms, media providers, and politicians. More durable approaches should focus on strengthening journalism through financial and structural support, fostering innovation and local media, and prioritising user empowerment measures. Only systemic safeguards of this kind can effectively promote pluralism, accountability, and resilience in the digital public sphere.

European Union (EU) consumer law is rather one-size-fits-all, meaning that it largely disregards differences between consumers and their protection needs. Consequently, there is underprotection, which can not only harm the internal market but is also at odds with the EU’s commitment to ensuring a high level of consumer protection. To be able to propose directions for improving the differentiation between consumers in EU consumer law, this paper answers the question of how the differentiation between consumers is currently operationalised and how that results in underprotection. Building on, among others, Black’s regulatory theory of the nature of legal rules, it is argued that a legal rule’s level of differentiation depends on how accurately its application conditions predict the situations in which it should apply, considering its aim. Through the application of this theoretical framework, it is argued that it is not just EU consumer law’s status-based application conditions that disregard individual differences between consumers. EU consumer law’s fact-based and norm-based application conditions also do not prevent the status-based application conditions from paving the way for underprotection. In support of this argument, several bottlenecks regarding the differentiation between consumers are identified, including the use of the average consumer benchmark, the emphasis on situational fact-based application conditions, and the rather limited role of norm-based application conditions. Altogether, these findings provide several directions for improving the differentiation between consumers in EU consumer law.

Prefigurative practices aim to foreshadow the more just society a radical political transformation would bring. So far, there has been little attention for the possibility of prefigurative legal practices. Perhaps the assumption is that prefigurative law is a contradiction in terms. Given the law’s structural complicity in social oppression, marginalisation, and exploitation, how can it ever be part of the solution? The idea of a prefigurative EU law may seem even more absurd. The EU and its laws are deeply entangled with capitalism, racism, imperialism, and premature deaths at its borders. Surely, EU law is beyond repair? But is it? This article suggests the opposite. It argues that a radically different EU law could become a source of hope for a society without structural oppression and marginalisation. Most concretely, it proposes to occupy the European Commission’s recent plans for a 28th legal regime. To this end, it shows how the Commission’s idea of a deregulatory sandbox could be turned into a prefigurative proposal, foreshadowing the legal non-regime for a radically horizontal European society without borders.

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).

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.

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 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 addresses questions about the identity of the subject of constitutional law from a historical-sociological perspective. It aims to reconstruct, beneath the surface of constitutional texts, the actual material subjects that commonly give rise to constitutions. To do this, it isolates the constituent conjunctures in which constitutions have typically been written, and it describes the social pressures that obliged members of different societies to articulate their subjectivities in constitutional fashion. It uses this reconstruction to suggest a new framework for approaching questions of constitutional subjectivity and legitimacy, as, contrary to more deliberative methods, it explains how experiences of military violence usually shaped the emergence of constitutional subjects. On this basis, it argues that constitutions typically acquired stable legitimating force, not by enacting the will of identifiable constitutional subjects, but by displacing such subjects into a manageable form, separate from their military emphases. It cautions against idealist theories of constitutional subjectivity, arguing that most constitutions create legitimacy for government specifically as they promote societal integration in procedures that are not defined by the subjects to which they attribute their authorship. It concludes by addressing some current examples of constitutional crisis, considering how these have been shaping by literalist understandings of constitutional subjectivity.

This paper explores the role of identity in constitutional law, moving beyond the dominant concept of constitutional identity. While many European constitutional texts reference various forms of identity – such as national, religious, or cultural – constitutional identity has been disproportionately emphasised in academic discourse. Through an empirical analysis of constitutional provisions and court rulings across 47 European states, this study demonstrates that identity plays a broader and more nuanced role in constitutional law than previously recognised. The paper categorises four types of relationships between identity and constitutional norms: identity as a right to protection, a basis for additional rights, a principle guiding constitutional interpretation, and an identity of the constitution itself. It highlights how constitutional courts interpret and balance competing identities, influencing the application of fundamental rights and constitutional principles. By highlighting examples that represent different models of identity systems, the paper reveals the necessity of giving scientific attention to the relationships between identities. Indeed, identities can undermine liberal constitutional values by privileging certain collective identities over individual identities and individual rights. Ultimately, the study argues that focusing solely on constitutional identity as an analytical concept to designate everything even remotely related to identity in constitutional law obscures the broader dynamics of identity within constitutional systems. It calls for a strict conceptual redefinition of constitutional identity in order to better understand how identity, in all its potential forms, continuously reshapes constitutional law and influences the evolution of democratic and human rights protections in European states.