Rulings of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) often raise more questions than they answer. Against this background, our contribution asks to what extent the ECJ’s jurisprudence is actually reinforcing rather than solving implementation conflicts and under what conditions a perpetuation of implementation conflicts may be avoided. We argue that the constitutionalization of large parts of European law makes it difficult for EU member states to settle implementation conflicts politically and bestows particular importance upon the ECJ. In our paper, we discuss three possible roles of the ECJ in solving implementation conflicts – the ECJ as filling legal gaps, the ECJ as triggering legislation, or the ECJ as fine-tuning its own jurisprudence in line with legislation. Only in the latter case, we argue, the ECJ actually contributes to an appeasement of implementation conflicts. Empirically, we take the Court’s jurisprudence on migrant workers’ and EU citizens’ access to social benefits as our point of departure and trace its impact in terms of (un)settling domestic implementation conflicts in two member states, the UK and Germany. The final section concludes: only recently and just with regard to economically inactive EU citizens has the ECJ started to fine-tune and align its jurisprudence with EU legislation and, thereby, endorsed a political settlement of the most severe implementation conflicts in this field.
