Teresa Violante
Commission v Hungary must be understood in the context of the European rule of law saga and the ongoing struggle for true European solidarity. The CJEU confirmed the autonomous justiciability of Article 2 TEU even when the link to specific EU Charter provisions or secondary legislation would already suffice. A close look at ASJP case and its antecedents discloses a European society selectively built – protecting some configurations while leaving others outside – with solidarity, as an operative legal category, consistently among the absences.
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Chiara Rimkus
Antoine Vauchez famously stated that the “constitutionalization of Europe” flourished in the hills of Fiesole. The Academy of European Law (AEL) at the European University Institute organizes an annual Summer Course on the Law of the European Union for two weeks of intensive lectures and exchange. I reflect on this year’s Summer Course as a site where ideas of European society are debated, contested, and further developed. Ultimately, I will critically reflect on what the Summer Course might tell us about the future of EU law.
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Hans-W. Micklitz
Integration Through Law was and remains, in various forms, the major driver of European integration. Constitutional Pluralism arose out of constitutionalisation, counterbalancing the move to neoliberalism in the new millennium. In Commission v Hungary, the Court recognised European society “in which pluralism prevails” as a legal concept. The Court radiates judicial authority at a time when Europe is again in crisis, politically through populism, economically through competitiveness and sustainability, and technologically through dependence on US companies.
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Marlene Tiede
Can one speak of a European society without speaking about private relations? Recent scholarship on European society has largely approached the concept through the lens of public law. Yet societies are constituted at least as much by the horizontal relations between individuals and groups as by public institutions. This blogpost turns to EU private international law (PIL) and will argue that EU PIL brings into view the importance of coordination frameworks for organising a mode of integration based not on unification, but on interdependence.
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Luke Dimitrios Spieker
On 21 April 2026, the full court wrote history, finding for the first time a separate infringement of Article 2 TEU. This landmark decision Commission v Hungary is the outcome of a long, public, and controversial process. The activation of Article 2 TEU is much less an act of self‑empowerment than a collective interpretation of the Court, Commission, Member States, civil society, and legal scholarship. Borrowing from Peter Häberle, we can see a European society of constitutional interpreters at work. The contribution tells their story.
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Katarzyna Łakomiec
The judgment in Commission v Hungary facilitates European society in a negative, boundary-setting sense: it identifies what cannot be accommodated within the European framework of shared values. EU digital regulation, by contrast, facilitates European society in a positive, practice-structuring sense: it translates its values into regulatory duties, procedures, and institutional practices. In my intervention, I show how digital regulation can facilitate the circulation of the values underpinning European society and identify the obstacles to building shared European values in the digital sphere.
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Costanza Margiotta
Commission v. Hungary plays a role analogous to a judgment of the Italian Constitutional Court: it turns the axiological dimension of the founding text into an autonomous criterion for assessment. Just as that judgment overcame the prescriptive/programmatic distinction, Commission v. Hungary overcame the distinction between values and legal norms, holding that Article 2 TEU contains values integral to its identity. Its significance lies not in constitutionalising European society, but in rendering legally relevant the social coexistence embodied in Article 2.
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Ferdinand Weber
The EU needs to position itself amid rough geopolitical currents and withstand inner contestations. A concept such as European society, which aims to foster a better sense of belonging, deserves support. But pushing things forward via legal engineering may cause questionable shifts. This contribution contrasts previous historical episodes of collective singularism with the latest efforts to judge and write the EU into a new era of constitutionalism. In particular, I show that they reach a natural limit: primary law’s other basic norms.
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Sophia Effinger
The central question of the justiciability of Article 2 TEU following Commission v Hungary is inevitably linked to the issue of protection of fundamental rights in the EU legal order. In fact, the judgment could extend the review of EU fundamental rights beyond the scope of Article 51(1) of the EU Charter, as the application of the values set out in Article 2 TEU is not limited to the “implementation of Union law”. In this contribution, I link Commission v Hungary to the debate on Reverse Solange.
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Aurélie Villanueva
The judgment of the CJEU in Case C-769/22 Commission v Hungary is not only about cultural services and their regulation but features several arguments regarding both Hungarian Christian culture and the culture of gender and sexually diverse individuals – what could be called LGBTQI+ culture in general.
I reflect on three cultural implications emerging from the case: the societal implication of cultural content, the role of EU law in accommodating national preferences and the limitations of EU law in interacting with cultural practices.
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Davide Tomaselli
The CJEU’s judgment in Commission v Hungary undeniably marked a monumental advancement of EU law. While acknowledging the magnitude of the case seems unproblematic, identifying its impact and its beneficiaries is a less straightforward task. In this contribution, I raise questions from a critical queer perspective while centering on the concept of a value-based European society. I argue that the Court’s underdeveloped elaboration on the politics of values eschews material structures of oppression and exploitation and thus risks foreclosing actual transformative legal interventions.
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Silvia Steininger, Seona Kim
Among the manifold analyses of Commission v Hungary and a flourishing debate on the realization of a European society based on values, the question of gender has been largely overlooked. We argue that the understanding of a European society which aims to uphold the values of Art. 2 TEU has to be anti-patriarchal. In the following contribution, we apply a feminist methodology – feminist re-writing/re-reading – to the Court’s arguments to carve out hypothetical future orientations for creating a non-patriarchal European society.
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Jasper Siegert
This contribution investigates a still underexplored element of Commission v Hungary. The judgment undoubtedly matters in terms of the enforceability of Article 2 TEU. Yet its significance reaches further. The Court also recalled that the Union’s common values are linked to one of the central mechanisms of EU law: the principle of mutual trust. I submit that mutual trust should not be understood merely as a technical rule of inter-state recognition but as the horizontal institutional grammar of interdependence within European society.
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Jakob Piep
One of the conceptually most significant innovations by the Court of Justice in Commission v. Hungary is its invocation of European society as a normative referent of the EU legal order, and the characterisation of that society through pluralism. This conceptual step has consequences that reach well beyond the judgement. I argue that it could place the Court on a potential collision course with the European Commission’s recent proposal to explicitly link EU civil society funding to compliance with the values enshrined in Article 2 TEU.
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Martin Höpner
The CJEU began to treat the values enshrined in Article 2 TEU as justiciable legal norms in its ASJP judgment from 2018. In its 2026 judgment in Commission v Hungary, it took the further step of treating those values as justiciable stand-alone norms and justified that step by invoking the existence of a European society. This contribution approaches the matter from a social-science point of view. I argue that the Article-2-TEU claim of a European society is theoretically unconvincing, empirically untenable, and politically dangerous.
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Franca Maria Feisel
Article 2 TEU values, such as pluralism, oscillate between descriptive claims, legal normativity, and appeals to European society as a source of authority. From a Habermasian perspective, the democratic legitimacy of EU values enforcement remains difficult to justify in the absence of a robust pan-European deliberative process through which those values can be articulated and contested. At the same time, Commission v Hungary constitutes a legitimate restorative intervention in a dysfunctional democratic process distorted by the stigmatisation of LGBTQ+ persons.
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Oliver Gerstenberg
In her academic writings, Advocate General Tamara Ćapeta has observed that many EU rights have been developing on a case-by-case basis, but so far without “a general and comprehensive explanation that they form part of a liberal and tolerant democratic society”. Drawing on this observation, and against the backdrop of the Court’s ruling in the Hungarian case, I will argue in this contribution that “pluralistic European society” is not only a sociological concept but also plays an important normative role as an organising regulative concept in EU constitutional-legal interpretation.
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Piotr Załęski
If there is anything we can say about European society, it is that it is pluralistic. My suggestion is to understand pluralism in light of Isaiah Berlin's philosophy of value pluralism. A pluralistic society may be understood as a particular liberal model of the good society, or as an irreducible plurality of incommensurable visions that must coexist. The former risks turning Article 2 TEU into a mandate for convergence towards one substantive vision of a good society.
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Jacob van de Beeten
Commission v Hungary marks the remarkable ascent of the European society discourse. A closer look, however, reveals that there is little transformative in the Court’s Article 2 TEU case law or its invocation of European society. Beneath the rhetoric of transformation, the institutional adaptation of the society discourse is above all conservative in nature, seeking to protect the authority of the EU. The hope that the Court will pursue a transformative agenda is unfounded. Rather, the notion of European society is instrumental in legitimising the status quo.
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Chiara Gentile
In its recent judgment No. 63/2026, the Italian Constitutional Court acknowledged the existence of a European society grounded on the values in Article 2 TEU. The judgment appears to be the first explicit reference by a constitutional court of an EU Member State to the emergence of a European society. Judgment concerned the constitutionality of recent legislation restricting access to Italian citizenship for descendants of Italians abroad. The passage on European society is an obiter dictum. I argue that its real significance lies in the question: Who belongs to European society?
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Frank Schorkopf
Armin von Bogdandy discovered the concept of society in Article 2 of the EU Treaty, theorised it as European society and brought it to the forefront of European legal scholarship and practice. The proposition of a European society stands or falls with the assumption that the Treaty of Lisbon has established a new framework. However, there are good reasons, particularly based on the history of Article 2 TEU and its structure, to take the exact opposite view.
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Armin von Bogdandy
In its decision Commission v Hungary, the CJEU’s plenary qualified EU law as the “common legal order of a society in which pluralism prevails”. Leaving pluralism aside, this blogpost explores possible meanings of the “of” in the first part of that formula. My exploration sketches four ever more foundational understandings: European society as the social field of EU law; EU law as expressing deep structures of that society; European society as generating EU law; and European society as the source of EU law’s authority.
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Silvia Steininger, Jasper Siegert
Since the CJEU published its monumental decision Commission v Hungary on April 21, scholars have already produced an impressive number of analyses. This symposium on ‘European Society after Commission v Hungary’ aims to add to this debate by focusing on the deeper, structural, and so far overlooked implications of this decision for the concept of European society. In this introductory post, we adopt a genealogical approach to the emergence of the research interest in European society and elaborate on its implications and challenges.
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