Justice in the EU

Abstract

Abstract In this book, Floris de Witte argues that European Union law can be understood as an instrument for the elaboration of what justice is, means, and requires on the level beyond the nation state. Approaching the question of justice from the European perspective presupposes three things: (1) it challenges us to think beyond the contractarian reflex that equates justice with political self-determination by a demos; (2) it demands that we articulate a tiered institutional and normative model, involving both the nation state and the EU, that can make sense of the new ties between individual citizens that the process of European integration, and in particular its norms of free movement, continue to generate; and (3) it requires that we construct a theory of transnational solidarity that can explain what those new ties—that may come in economic, social, or political forms—tells us about our transnational obligations of justice. This book tackles each of these three questions in turn. It explains which precise institutional and normative structures are indispensable in the pursuit of justice; explains how the European Union can be understood to increase our capacity for the attainment of justice; and formulates a theory of transnational solidarity that informs the interaction between the national and the European spheres. Three different types of transnational solidarity are identified and carefully traced throughout the case law of the European Court of Justice (ECJ): market solidarity, communitarian solidarity, and aspirational solidarity. Read together, these three transnational solidarities tell us exactly what justice means in the EU.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 104 citations exist upstream.