The EU Social Contract – Wishful Thinking or in the Making?

The core question of the presentation is whether and to what extent the EU can be said to be based on a social contract. The paper is based on a short genealogy of how social contracts have been previously theorised in the history of ideas. This genealogy reveals a series of core conceptual questions and puzzles that need to be generally addressed by social contract theories. The nexus between citizens and governors (bottom-up), on the one hand, and government to citizens (top-down) as well as among the citizens as demos is key to understanding social contracts and their current challenges. Any social contract that is stable will rely on 1) a legitimate foundation that usually has a legal dimension and works in a top-down direction (this can be a constitution) and 2) a bottom-up basis, namely citizens and their support and identification of the social contract in a broad sense. 3) Horizontal links between the citizens? This means that a social contract is not merely a constitution, i.e. a legal document that has been concluded in a top-down way, but also consists of bottom-up identification and support by the citizens. The question leading the paper is how these top-down, bottom-up and horizontal dimensions of a social can be conceptualised with regards to the European Union, and what kind of explicit/ formal and implicit/ tacit consent do they entail – or not.