@article{2026:steiert:telling_s,
title = {Telling (Social) Europe Differently: Fractures, Discontinuities, and Alternative Trajectories in 70 Years of EU Law},
year = {2026},
note = {European Union (EU) integration is political and contingent, yet many
legal accounts portray it as a process of steady institutional
expansion and individual emancipation. This framing is particularly
problematic for the social dimension of integration, which regulates
labour and welfare – domains directly linked to democratic
participation and the distribution of power and wealth. This article
has therefore two objectives. First, it uses Social Europe to show how
70 Years of EU Law – A Union for Its Citizens, the volume discussed
in this special issue and thus the Commission Legal Service present
the history of EU integration indeed as largely legal, institutionally
driven, incremental, emancipatory, and narrowly European. Second, the
article conversely proposes to place a democratic, constructive, and
distributive reflection at the centre of how EU integration, including
its social dimension, is narrated. The story of the EU and its law
should not be told as a unidirectional, legal, institutional, and
individually emancipatory progression but through the recognition of
fracture, discontinuity, and alternative trajectory. The meaning of EU
competences, legal forms and practices, and their distributive
consequences emerges and transforms in power struggles that determine
which of several plausible meanings becomes law and policy. By
revisiting the past, this article highlights the reversibility of
these struggles and recovers other ‘plausible worlds’ of EU law in
the social field that have not (yet) been realised.},
journal = {Zeitschrift für ausländisches öffentliches Recht und Völkerrecht / Heidelberg Journal of International Law},
pages = {331--356},
author = {Steiert, Marc},
volume = {86},
number = {1}
}