Diamond Ashiagbor

Unravelling the Embedded Liberal Bargain: Labour and Social Welfare Law in the Context of EU Market Integration

European economic integration with a minimalist social policy at EU level was in part made possible by strong domestic labour market and social welfare institutions. The main contention of this paper is that EU market liberalisation was embedded within institutions of social citizenship at domestic level, which served to counter the liberalisation of the internal market. But this settlement has been put under strain. In addition to the challenges posed to the sustainability of European welfare states by the global economic crisis, the internal market jurisprudence of the Court of Justice casts doubt on the sustainability of the ‘embedded liberal bargain’. This paper focuses on the role of the Court, in particular in its jurisprudence on the interaction between (EU) market freedoms and (national) labour law, which undermines the ability of states to retain their regulatory autonomy over labour or social welfare law and, arguably, speeds up the unravelling of the ‘embedded liberal bargain’.

The European Union after the Treaty of Lisbon

Introduction Diamond Ashiagbor, Nicola Countouris and Ioannis Lianos 1. The institutional development of the EU post-Lisbon: a case of plus ca change...? Laurent Pech 2. Competence after Lisbon: the elusive search for bright lines Takis Tridimas 3. The Charter, the ECJ and national courts P. P. Craig 4. Accession of the EU to the ECHR: who would be responsible in Strasbourg? Tobias Lock 5. EU citizenship after Lisbon Niamh Nic Shuibhne 6. The law and politics of migration and asylum: the Lisbon Treaty and the EU Sabina Anne Espinoza and Claude Moraes 7. The European Unions Common Foreign and Security Policy after Lisbon Panos Koutrakos 8. The European Ombudsman and good administration post-Lisbon P. Nikiforos Diamandouros, European Ombudsman 9. European contract law after Lisbon Lucinda Miller 10. Competition law in the European Union after the Treaty of Lisbon Ioannis Lianos 11. The unexpected revision of the Lisbon Treaty and the establishment of a European Stability Mechanism Jean-Victor Louis.

Theorizing the Relationship Between Social Law and Markets in Regional Integration Projects

This article explores regional integration projects in the global South and constraints upon them, in particular the social dislocations caused by global and European trade policies, and the response of states in the South to the institutional design of the global trade regime. Its focus is on the use of economic sociology of law as a methodological approach through which to rethink the relationship between law, markets and state – and to explore how these interact in the context of one regionalization project (the European Union (EU)) as well as interrogating whether economic sociology can similarly cast light on another regionalization project (the African Union (AU)). The rise of the market as the ‘metric of the rationality of law and policy’ challenges labour market institutions, especially in the context of cross-national market integration projects (namely the EU and the AU) of which a core raison d’être is that labour is commodified as one of the factors of production. The article examines the role of the ‘social state’ and of labour market institutions as part of an array of adjustment mechanisms responding to the liberalization of trade and the opening of national borders: to what extent can social law and social rights mediate the operation of markets, and what does this mean when viewed from the perspective of developing as well as industrialized countries?