European law from the perspective of societal constitutionalism

Abstract

This paper proposes that societal constitutionalism, as elaborated by Gunther Teubner, provides a potential legal approach to understand the structure of the EU, one that can provide valuable insights into how to deal with some of the problems generating its identity crisis. The theory of societal constitutionalism provides a perspective of the EU as a flexible, malleable organization, able to maintain a certain coherence while remaining open for adaptation to different circumstances. This structure, combining flexibility with coherence, could serve as a guideline in rethinking or reforming an EU that can overcome/survive the current crisis. The paper is structured in six parts, each of them examining an issue of EU law, proposing how it would be examined in the light of Teubner’s theory of societal constitutionalism. This analysis intends to reveal the EU legal persona that emerges from the viewpoint of social systems theory, in the context of examples that have been discussed in the scholarly legal literature on the EU crisis.