Telling (Social) Europe Differently: Fractures, Discontinuities, and Alternative Trajectories in 70 Years of EU Law

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.