Part IV focused on principles designed to facilitate the operation of legal order as such and, especially, the consistent interaction of the central and decentral – national and sub-national – legal systems in the federal entity which is the European Union. Part V then turned to principles intended to foster the functioning of the central integration instrument, i.e. the internal market as driven by the individual pursuit of profit in the forms and structures provided by private law. More recently, EU law has increasingly recognised a third group of principles which aim at a social balance between economic actors in general and the private parties to a contract or dispute in particular; these latter axioms are designated here as solidarity principles.

The most general maxims of this kind are the principle of equality, which includes non-discrimination (infra , Chapter XXVI), and the principle of good faith ( infra , Chapter XXVII ). Of growing significance in the internal market is the goal of protecting weaker parties; it plays an ever more important role in the legislation of the European Union. And it has been suggested by the late Norbert Reich that a “general principle of protection of the weaker party in civil law relations can be said to exist in the applicable secondary law.”While this assertion will turn out to be unfounded (infra, Chapter XXVIII), some special applications concerning in particular the principle of consumer protection (infra , Chapter XXIX) and the principle of the protection of workers in employment relations (infra , Chapter XXX) deserve closer scrutiny.

GENERAL ASPECTS

EQUALITY AND NON-DISCRIMINATION GENERAL ASPECTS

Equality –a difficult concept

The Rome Treaty did not lay down a general principle of equality. But it prohibited discrimination in various contexts, sometimes following the model of the Coal and Steel Treaty: with regards to the whole scope of application of the Treaties the discrimination on grounds of nationality is proscribed by Article 7 EEC (now, 18 TFEU), and the basic freedoms have been held to “embody specific instances” of this more general prohibition.