School of Law

Dates: September 2008 - August 2010

The debate about a Constitution for the EU has highlighted tensions between "Social Europe" and "European Economic Integration." These are only partly reflected in the Treaty of Lisbon.

Accordingly, the task to investigate the balancing of these tensions in EU law and politics remains current, even after the entering into force of the Treaty of Lisbon. This is the theme of the project.

To analyse these tensions as experienced by European citizens, it will be necessary to consider not only the EU level constitutional normative framework, but also its interaction with law and politics at national level.

Theories of multilevel governance in the EU can and have been used to investigate the interrelation between economic integration and social Europe. There is, however, a lack of research on the interrelation of these dimensions across all levels.

Such neglect is an obstacle to the attainment of socio-economic aims enshrined in the Lisbon strategy, which aims at generating the most dynamic knowledge based economy in the world. This requires Europe to maximise skills and knowledge of people, both EU citizens and migrants from other parts of the world.

Accordingly, the analysis of the interaction between social and economic European integration is called for.

The project aims to develop a theoretical framework for comprehensively appraising economic and social constitutionalism in a multi-level polity.

To this end, three exploratory studies examining the effect of economic and social integration at Member State level will be conducted. These focus on the fields of immigration, services of general interest and corporate governance.