Pluralism is a defining feature of European human rights law and of the European constitution. Contestability and conditional deference determine how participating states eventually calibrate their relation to international and supranational authority. This structure gives rise to differences of opinion that reverberate throughout a public sphere that is composed of a growing number of scholars. They increasingly rely on digital media to exchange their ideas. A major role has come to be played by blogs such as the Verfassungsblog. Since its inception, its focus has rested on defending the values of constitutionalism vis-à-vis ‘backsliding’ Member States. The constitutional culture that results from this is somewhat reminiscent of Germany during the period of the Weimar Republic (1919–1933). While the rise of authoritarianism is a major issue, public law scholarship appears to become increasingly partisan. As European constitutional law emerges against the backdrop of an expanding public sphere, scholarly interventions are drawn into the vortex of politics. Unsurprisingly, scholarship begins to face up to its politicisation by reflecting on its proper task.

This article seeks to unpack the potential and limits of markets as instruments of economic planning in sustainability capitalism. Recent policies for sustainability transitions in the United States (USA) and the European Union (EU) (eg, Infrastructure Law, EU Green Deal) have signaled aspirations for a more prominent role of the state in coordinating the economy, while still relying primarily on market mechanisms for such coordination. Yet, could the market itself be conceptualised and structured as a political instrumentality for the achievement of social objectives? An important part of the puzzle of sustainability transitions is the transportation sector, and specifically the transition to Electric Vehicles, or New Energy Vehicles (NEVs). I explore the comparative legal constructions of markets for NEVs in China – the current global leader in NEVs – the USA, and the EU. Drawing from this case study, I first argue that law makes planning possible within markets, as the functional power of market processes can be strategically deployed for the achievement of politically set objectives. Acknowledging the deliberate and artificial character of markets raises the question of what we want markets for, broadening the scope of the political possibilities enclosed in them. I, then, proceed to challenge the enduring argument of the epistemic deficit of central planners, which morphs into prescriptions of decentralisation. I show that arguments against legal centralism and planning cannot stand on just epistemological grounds and are inevitably political. Finally, I attempt to outline the limits of planning within markets – and thus, to a certain extent, the limits of the constitutive function of law – for broader projects of social transformation.

Using the lens of immigration and asylum, this Article develops a new understanding of legal personhood on the basis of equal human dignity, as the interface between legal personhood, equality and human rights, in order to address the dual-faceted and opposing reality of immigrants and asylum claimants in relation to their equality as humans in the order of nature and their inequality within the social/political order of Europe, where they are subjected to a constant process of depersonification and reification. This reformulated approach to legal personhood not only seeks to remove the debasement and dehumanisation that has come to characterise European Union (EU) immigration and asylum law but also intends to address the limitations of the Common European Asylum System (CEAS) as a valid platform for translating the EU’s own self-proclaimed commitment to human rights into justiciable normative claims.

By the turn of the 1990s, tax competition among national governments had emerged as a powerful law-making practice. The possibility of tax competition essentially depends on the design of transnational law, such as European law. This Article examines the change of economic, political, and legal ideas that have shaped responses by the European Communities and the European Union (EU) to income tax competition. It asserts that under the post-war settlement of embedded liberalism and moderate market integration, tax competition was not perceived as a fully developed phenomenon. Under increased cross-border economic mobility in the 1990s, tax competition became a critical concern but received a liberal and permissive reaction from the EU. In the 2010s, governing tax competition in the EU became a more vital topic. Still, in the contemporary EU, turning political ideas into legal rules capable of addressing tax competition remains hampered by the EU law requirement of unanimous decision-making. The European choice of whether and how to address tax competition involves profoundly contrasting ideas on the means by which to govern the socio-economic reality. The decision between spontaneous and regulated income tax integration is therefore a salient political question, but the unanimity rule undermines political contestation over tax competition and over the European model of fiscal federalism. The Article comes to a close by reflecting on whether the EU legal order offers means to overcome the deadlock of unanimity and whether it could accommodate a more properly political contestation over the Europeanisation of income taxation.

There has been a turn to fundamental rights in environmental and climate cases before national and international courts in recent years. We know very little whether there has been such a turn in relation to European Union (EU) law before the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). The CJEU occupies an increasingly relevant position in this nexus between environmental law and human rights because of strong and effective EU enforcement mechanisms, the abundance of specific EU secondary environmental law, the growing role of fundamental rights since 2009 and the self-standing provision on the environment in Article 37 of the Charter. An analysis of the case law, nonetheless, shows that Charter rights that can be used as ‘swords’ in the interest of environmental protection have so far played only a limited role. After explaining the absence of a rights turn, we argue that such a turn is warranted before the CJEU as well, also from a legal perspective. This article examines two potential avenues. The CJEU can derive positive obligations from relevant Charter provisions, including Articles 2 (right to life) and 7 (right to respect for private life and the home) of the Charter, or it can rely more extensively on Article 37 as a tool for interpreting primary and secondary EU law in an environmentally friendly way.

In Locke’s philosophy money is ‘naturalised’ and thus ostensibly removed from political contestation. Locke has been criticised for marginalising monetary politics, and thus downplaying the conventional character of money that could potentially allow for democratic monetary reform. Drawing on Marx’s writings, this paper shows that money is indeed a social convention, but its inherent economic functioning restricts its susceptibility to political contestation. There are limits to the democratic reform of money in a capitalist economy that spring from money’s own nature.

Specifically, the politics of money is rooted in the tension between money as measure of value and money as unit of account. The state draws political power from setting the unit of account, but the measurement of value occurs spontaneously among commodity producers, thereby generating tension that curbs monetary politics. In contemporary conditions, this is typified by central banks having the freedom to manage the unit of account but subject to heavy economic constraints rooted in value measurement. In this light, democratic monetary reform requires restricting the spontaneous measurement of value, thus intervening at the heart of the capitalist economy. For money to be democratic it needs to have a much narrower range of economic functioning.

This paper aims at discussing the historical trajectory of European money and the way it can be illuminated through a dialogue with Stefan Eich’s The Currency of Politics. Fleshing out the different theories, visions, and conceptualisations of money in Eich’s book, this paper utilises this exposition to evaluate the development and operationalisation of European money. With an eye to contemporary debates about the re-politicisation or democratisation of money, the paper will critically assess the way in which Eich’s account can be used as a framework to explain European money.

This response gives me the opportunity to clarify, extend, and complement several aspects of my conceptual and historical argument in The Currency of Politics. I do so primarily by situating my account more explicitly within debates over European monetary politics, by expanding on my use of history, and by articulating what differentiates my concern with the political theory of money and the politics of depoliticisation from complementary accounts. In doing so I elaborate on the ways in which engagement with the thought of John Maynard Keynes helped to structure my approach. While there are important limits to the politics of money under contemporary capitalism, these limits are not fixed economic ones but are better seen as political limits of monetary politics that nonetheless leave considerable space for articulating alternative demands for more democratic forms of money. This framing allows me to extend my argument in order to address contemporary struggles over credit policy, monetary reform, and climate change in Europe. I thus end with a set of critical reflections on the constitutional status of money in the European project and beyond.