Symposium: Law, Conflict and Transformation

The symposium brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to discuss Christian Joerges’s most recent book “Conflict and Transformation: Essays on European Law and Policy” (2022). The book offers an integrated reading of different strands of Joerges’s earlier work, offering a compelling theory about the role of law in shaping the political economy of the European integration project. Joerges’s work has consistently pointed to the intellectual weakness of the “integration through law” ideology that has shaped the thinking on European integration since its early years.

The symposium starts with a discussion on the ideational framework behind the “integration through law” project, connecting its origins with the idea of the Economic Constitution or the darker legacies of law in Europe (Panel 1). Further, we are looking at the effects of the “integration through law” project and systematic neglect of “the economic” and the political dynamics of European integration, which affected the direction in which the European integration project has developed as a polity (Panel 2). Finally, based on Joerges’s thought on Social Europe we look at the relationship between the law and ‘the social’ in the political economy of supranational integration (Panel 3).