Guido Comparato

The rationales of financial inclusion in the changing European private law

This contribution traces the development and the politics of the idea of the inclusion of citizens in the financial market and in particular in the credit market. It shows that financial inclusion is fundamentally meant to perform both an economic and a social function and describes how that idea has been understood and implemented specifically in the multi-level European system. The policy of financial inclusion as understood at the European level is strongly characterized by a market rationale that is mostly concerned with granting access to the credit market and, as is now emerging more clearly, ensuring the stability of that market. The social function remains on the contrary less developed. Given this framework, the negative consequences of the inclusion of citizens in the financial market, which can manifest themselves as a form of social exclusion, have to be faced primarily by the law of the Member States, although this is bound to have repercussions at the supranational level. Resumé: Cet article décrit le développement et la politique de l’idée d’inclusion des citoyens dans le secteur financier et plus précisément dans le marché du crédit. Il montre que cette inclusion financière est fondamentalement destinée à remplir une fonction à la fois économique et sociale et décrit comment cette idée a été comprise et mis en œuvre spécifiquement dans le système européen à plusieurs niveaux. La politique de l’inclusion financière tel que comprise à l’échelle européenne est fortement caractérisée par une logique de marché principalement concernée par l’accord de l’accès au marché du crédit et plus récemment la stabilité financière, alors que la fonction sociale reste moins développée. Dans ce cadre, les conséquences négatives de l’inclusion des citoyens dans le marché financier, qui peuvent se manifester comme une forme d’exclusion sociale, doivent être atténuées principalement par le droit des États membres, bien que cela aura des répercussions au niveau supranational aussi. Guido Comparato: Research Associate, Law Department of the European University Institute, Florence, E ˗ Mail: Guido.Comparato@EUI.eu ERCL 2015; 11(1): 22–45

General Principles of EU Civil Law

If defining a principle and distinguishing it from a rule is in itself a challenging task, principles have become a particularly ambiguous category in the area of European private law: general principles of EU law, soft-law instruments presenting themselves as compilations of principles, and lastly even references to principles of civil law by the CJEU are all elements that contribute to enrich but at the same time complicate the scenario. In this confounding setting, efforts to clearly identify at least some of those principles of civil law are mostly valuable. Such is the enterprise of the book by Norbert Reich: General Principles of EU Civil Law. The volume develops a number of ideas that the author already presented in a few other recent publications, now updated and re-organised in a coherent account according to a common thread – the concept of ‘general principles’. As is well known, when it introduced the concept in its reasoning, the Court of Justice mentioned principles of civil law such as discharge by performance, unjust enrichment, good faith, and so on; at the same time these are the kind of principles which private lawyers in Europe are traditionally more familiar with. However, these – or at least some of these – are not the ‘general’ principles on which Reich mainly focuses. The book is more ambitious than aiming at listing the national principles that were somehow recognised by the Court in passing, and rather attempts to discover the essentially European principles of EU civil law. In order to achieve this objective, the author makes the methodological choice of examining the case-law of the CJEU on contract law and civil liability. Looking at this acquis communautaire in particular, the focus is placed on a body of rules which appears as essentially dissimilar from the one of traditional private law inasmuch as it is composed of mostly mandatory rules with a regulatory undertone, and for the description of which the author thus accepts the label of