Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-r5fsc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-04T12:33:37.536Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Series Editors’ Preface

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 October 2024

Marija Bartl
Affiliation:
University of Amsterdam
Type
Chapter
Information
Reimagining Prosperity
Toward a New Imaginary of Law and Political Economy in the EU
, pp. xiii - xiv
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NC
This content is Open Access and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence CC-BY-NC 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/cclicenses/

The last decade has seen a revival of interest in the ideas or ‘constitutional imaginaries’ underlying the European Union (EU) and its law.Footnote 1 To give one example, the rule of law crisis has re-enforced a changing narrative, forwarded, for example, by the current President of the Court of Justice, that protecting fundamental values is at the core of Europe’s legal mission.Footnote 2 As a corollary, it has become less fashionable to see the functional goals of the internal market as the EU’s law core.

This book, by Marija Bartl, both rejects and embraces this change. On the one hand, it is firmly about the importance of understanding European integration in terms of markets and prosperity and their ability to contribute to the lives of Europeans. It thus fits with a line of research connecting EU law to changes in political economy.Footnote 3 On the other hand, it urges a fundamental rethink of how we imagine prosperity. In Bartl’s vision, the failure of privatised prosperity requires a new imaginary of prosperity, where democratic and collective institutions take greater control over economic goods and their distribution.

Such a reinvented shared vision for prosperity is important, so she argues, not just for economic reasons but because narratives of prosperity and of democracy co-constitute each other. There is, therefore, a connection between the neoliberal narrative of prosperity that has dominated the Union for the last decades and the erosion of trust in democratic institutions that has established a turn to tribal or populist imaginaries as its political shadow. Bartl’s book is thus fundamentally about how new ideas of the role of collective institutions in Europe’s economic order are vital in reversing patterns of democratic decay.

In addition to its overall conceptual argument, the book carries a close interest in economic institutions, historically reconstructing how core elements of EU law, from corporate governance to industrial policy, consumer protection, and the regulation of new technologies, are shaped by underlying ideas on how they contribute to prosperity. In every chapter, Bartl is not content to revisit past debates but also engages with how new EU initiatives – from the European Green Deal to regulation of the circular economy – slowly attempt to embed collective institutions in their vision of how prosperity in Europe can be realised. Readers can therefore both engage with the book’s overall argument and use it as a guide to understand how new collective goals are reshaping concrete areas of EU law and policy.

As a book that does not simply analyse EU law but makes compelling arguments about its future, Marija Bartl’s monograph is an important contribution to the field. We are delighted to welcome it to the Cambridge Studies in European Law and Policy series.

Mark Dawson

Laurence Gormley

Jo Shaw

1 See, for example, Komarek (ed.), European Constitutional Imaginaries: Between Ideology and Utopia (Oxford University Press, 2023).

2 Lenaerts, ‘New Horizons for the Rule of Law within the EU’. German Law Journal 21.1 (2020): 29–34.

3 P. Kjaer (ed.) The Law of Political Economy: Transformation in the Function of Law (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

Footnotes

1 See, for example, Komarek (ed.), European Constitutional Imaginaries: Between Ideology and Utopia (Oxford University Press, 2023).

2 Lenaerts, ‘New Horizons for the Rule of Law within the EU’. German Law Journal 21.1 (2020): 29–34.

3 P. Kjaer (ed.) The Law of Political Economy: Transformation in the Function of Law (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • Series Editors’ Preface
  • Marija Bartl, University of Amsterdam
  • Book: Reimagining Prosperity
  • Online publication: 18 October 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009236195.001
Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Series Editors’ Preface
  • Marija Bartl, University of Amsterdam
  • Book: Reimagining Prosperity
  • Online publication: 18 October 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009236195.001
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Series Editors’ Preface
  • Marija Bartl, University of Amsterdam
  • Book: Reimagining Prosperity
  • Online publication: 18 October 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009236195.001
Available formats
×