This book presents a study of the complex and changing relations that have successively prevailed – in the magmatic development of European integration – between the construction of the Common Market and social rights and policies. In essence, it examines the nature of the space and role that have been, are and are likely to be allocated, in the construction of the Community, to social rights and policies at national and supranational level.

The focus of the analysis is centred on the constitutional dimension of the relations in question. This is reconstructed both (and primarily) from the dynamic perspective offered by an examination of the changes that have effectively remoulded the Community's economic constitution since its beginnings up to the present day, and from the static perspective ensuing from a comparison of the various ideal – or, more accurately, ideal-type – models of that constitution which, although obviously not claiming to explain the historical realities of the changes, nonetheless help to categorize them from a normative point of view.

The book develops a research perspective that could be described as intrinsically interdisciplinary.

Labour law – perhaps more than other legal disciplines – has in fact always found in the interdisciplinary and comparative method one of the features that best connote and specify its identity and its cognitive status, immersed as they are in the reality of more deep-seated social dynamics.