This special issue of the German Law Journal is devoted to the ideas of regeneration Europe, an initiative that calls for a new normative paradigm for the European Union. At its very core, regeneration Europe argues that the European Union should be more European and that it should more firmly reflect the European modus operandi of society. While it is unmistakable that the European Union is experiencing a crisis of identity—among the many other types of crisis that the contributions to this special issue highlight—it is hardly controversial to state that Europe is more than a market, more than an incipient political community or fiscal union. To its citizens, Europe is, first and foremost, a tangible reality. The difficulty in describing the Union's normative texture, or the “nature of the beast,” as legal scholars particularly enjoy doing, does not reduce its tangible reality. Cultural diversity, political pluralism and individualism do not necessarily presume self-referential indecision. As Jonathan Franzen wrote on the indeterminacy of the US cultural framework:

In Greek mythology, King Sisyphus becomes a prisoner of inevitability, existentially condemned to roll a boulder up a hill for the sake of seeing it roll back down immediately. His sense of desperation and futility is reminiscent of Europe today. It has become a prisoner of the circularity of stabilizing inherently unstable markets. And each cycle exacerbates the dominance of the economic over the political, the erosion of democratic paradigms, the indifference of citizens, and the divorce between social reality and its political translation. Political discourse is suspended while “technocrats” redistribute societal resources and aspirations in the name of economic necessity. And we, the Europeans, are sidelined and numbed by the repetitive talk of austerity and economic stability, EFSF and ESM, financial leverage and institutional reforms. All presented as inevitable for the health of the market, as a bitter medicine required to cease the pain. Needless to say, it will not; the pain is systemic.

In this paper, I put forward four theses and one coda. The theses can be summarized as follows:

“We seem to be caught in an ‘impossible interregnum': After the end of classical national sovereignty, before the beginning of a postnational sovereignty.”

Recent proposals to fix Europe's ailing monetary union have led some to endorse a stronger fiscal union. Such a fiscal union, which would supposedly comprise stronger budgetary supervision as well as a modicum of revenue collection by the Union itself, is taken to mark the step towards “political” union. The article explores the question of what, if anything, is understood by “political” in this context. After distinguishing three possible meanings of political union, the article argues that a true union of this kind would rest its focus on the form of life that can be sustained among Europeans. Surprisingly perhaps, the article concludes that less centralization and unwinding monetary union in its current form may well be more congenial to a political union than hectic bids for fiscal centralization.

This contribution analyzes how the process of European integration has affected the capacity of citizens to collectively decide on the “social question,” that is, on the distribution of resources and life chances between individuals in a society. It starts by highlighting the pivotal role of “the political” in any answer to such question (B); generally traces the demise of this role under the pressures of globalization, legal integration, and the sovereign debt crisis (C); and suggests that law has been an important instrument for the lifting of the social question outside the scope of political contestation. This contribution then briefly catalogues different alternatives that can serve to reappropriate the social question within the realm of politics, argues that our priority should lie in the formation of a transnational public sphere, and suggests that EU law can, in several ways, contribute towards, if not fully deliver, a return of authorship and ownership about how societies function to the citizen (D).

Since the global economic crisis began in 2007, the EU's response has been an attempt to muddle through, but it is generally recognized that more far-reaching changes to its structures are inevitable in the long term. One possible trajectory is towards disintegration; another is towards an increasingly “multi-speed” Europe—possibly accompanied by a splintering of the Eurozone whereby one or more smaller countries depart. A third possibility is closer union. Many would agree with the proposition that if destructive centrifugal forces are to be kept at bay, the next step for the EU must be political union, including a fiscal and transfer union—one that requires countries of the developed core supporting their brethren struggling at the periphery. Through this fraternal process, the EU will be able to achieve a new constitutional moment, a moment of refoundation in which its “social” soul is rediscovered. No longer will corporate lobbies be granted privileged access to the offices of Brussels. Powerful and democratically accountable institutions will be constructed, and geared around one of the EU's defining values: Solidarity.

The present-day EU, as is well known, faces a serious crisis. As contributions to this volume make clear, that crisis is political as much as it is economic. Developments such as the limitations on national democracies established via the golden rule, as well as the exclusion of parliaments from EU decision-making, illustrate the grave challenges to democracy brought about by the EU's response to the euro crisis. Given this context, the task of regenerating Europe is primarily a political task. It would be strange indeed to address such a crisis by turning to a seemingly apolitical tool, such as human rights. Accordingly, human rights—anti-majoritarian and legalistic—seem to be in full retreat from the kind of adversarial politics needed to reorient the European project along more democratic lines.

Democratically legitimized European integration calls for developments in culture and society—which arise naturally in the scope of on-going political, economic and institutional European Union (EU) integration—to be publically debated so they may be politically processed. The space where this happens is the public sphere, or, in the context of the EU, the European public sphere. The latter complements national public spheres. Successful integration among EU Member States is made possible by adhering to a common set of values at the same time as respecting the national identities of the Member States and fostering cultural diversity. By way of Union citizenship rights, individuals are able to make use of and actively promote the Europeanization of societies and cultures. Yet citizens are affected by Europeanization to differing degrees, with only a minority of citizens actively partaking in transnational exchange. In order to account for European integration democratically, the EU treaties hold provisions allowing for a close institutional interdependence of national and European democracy.

Between the relics of a nation state past and the promises of a transnational future, the normative evolution of the European Union has rightly been described as “an international legal experiment.” Europeanization, in that sense, has been construed as an experimental legal mode for the integration of national economic diversity through harmonized regulation. Even though the European Union's operating code has remained decisively economic, the normative matrix itself has transcended the historical objective of economic homogeneity. European integration therefore experienced a normative turn after the completion of the single market; the European Union progressively captured the social space of the continent, evolving into a societal experiment of normative imagination and cultural plurality, taking it beyond economic integration, market freedoms, and monetary stability.