As the dust of Commission v Hungary begins to settle, it is time to take a step back and reflect on what can only be described as a monumental decision. Since the CJEU published the decision on April 21 (nine days after the Hungarian elections), scholars have already produced an impressive number of analyses, particularly in academic blogs such as Verfassungsblog, EU Law Live, European Law Blog, and others. This symposium 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 to the symposium on ‘European Society after Commission v Hungary’, we adopt a genealogical approach to the emergence of the research interest in European society, synthesise its main strands and disagreements, and elaborate on its implications and challenges. Ultimately, we foreshadow the diverse contributions that will be featured in the coming weeks.

Exploring European Society

In the context of a rapidly changing world and a crisis of the rule of law, EU legal scholarship has been searching for new ideas to grasp the transformations the Union is currently experiencing. Earlier ideational movements, such as ‘integration through law’ or ‘constitutional pluralism’, have already demonstrated the value of theoretical understandings in shaping our discussions on the state of EU law. Importantly, those concepts were never homogeneous but characterised by divergence. They emerged through interaction, disagreement, and in response to developments in practice, particularly the jurisprudence of the CJEU and other national apex courts.

We situate ourselves in this tradition, inviting those who advocate for and against the idea of European society to reflect on its normative vision(s), its methodological re-orientation(s), its practical application, and its implications for the future of EU law. The research on European society emerged institutionally from two pillars: Loïc Azoulai at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence and Armin von Bogdandy at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law (MPIL) in Heidelberg. While the discourse has found fruitful and dynamic common ground, divergencies and the absence of a shared understanding of European society remain defining features of this research interest. European society, in this sense, provides a fixpoint to have a conversation over the central challenges that the Union faces – a lens through which to address our questions, and a range of methodological perspectives to do so.

What follows is not a list of accomplishments but rather a look into the engine room. In 2023, a first working group was established, which resulted in a symposium at European Law Open in 2025. This symposium emerged from the first international seminar on European Society at the Crossroads of Disciplines, Politics and Imaginaries organised by Loïc Azoulai, Armin von Bogdandy, and Silvia Steininger in March 2026. An early-career workshop on European Society – Facets and Fault Lines will take place this autumn. We have since invited others who expressed their interest in the topic to join the symposium. Of course, this group is not reflective of the diversity of the actual European society and does not claim to do so.

Commission v Hungary serves as a perfect entry point for our discussion. In this decision, the CJEU not only held that Article 2 TEU can be invoked as a self-standing provision in infringement proceedings but also acknowledged the existence of a society in which pluralism prevails – a historic first.

European Society and Article 2 TEU

A first perspective European society provides is a normative one. Its textual anchor lies in Article 2 TEU, which states that the Union’s founding values are “common to the Member States in a society”. This perspective is particularly important for interpreting the CJEU’s recent constitutional jurisprudence and its turn to values. Read through the lens of European society, that case law expresses a deeper claim about the kind of society the Union seeks to sustain. This is visible in the Commission’s framing of the Hungarian anti-LGBTQIA+ law as a “frontal and deep attack against […] European society”. It also appears in the notion of a “good society” in AG Ćapeta’s Opinion. Most importantly, it is reflected in the judgement itself, where the Court held that the Hungarian law ran “contrary to the very identity of the Union as a common legal order in a society in which pluralism prevails” (para. 556). Therefore, the notion of society invites us to ask what Europeans are said to have in common – and where we draw our red lines.

Yet, this approach goes further and also allows for internal critique. If the values of Article 2 TEU are “common to the Member States”, one may ask whether it is for the Court to concretise and enforce them, or whether such questions should primarily be determined through deliberative political processes. The language of European society can therefore be used to scrutinise the Court’s institutional role and the limits of judicial constitutionalisation. At the same time, Article 2 TEU provides a standard against which both the Union, its institutions, and the Member States may be assessed.

At a more conceptual level, placing European society at the heart of what the Court has described as the Union’s “very identity” (para. 556) raises a more fundamental question: How does the EU legal order relate to this society? In the absence of a European ‘people’, ‘nation’ or ‘demos’, can society serve as the collective singular that helps explain the Union’s authority? Is this what the Court suggests when it describes the Union as the “common legal order of a society” (para. 551)? Or should we resist giving such constitutional weight to a concept as indeterminate as society? These questions go to the core of the Union’s constitutional self-understanding.

European Society as a Method

The second perspective European society provides is methodological. The link to society as the central lens is an attempt to reconnect EU legal studies with the political and social conditions in which EU law operates. The underlying assumption is that EU law, its law and grammar, is detached from the ‘lived experiences’ of its people, resulting in alienation in both scholarship and practice. Putting society at the centre thus allows not only to capture the ‘social’ turn that we observe in recent years in EU legal discourse, but also to broaden the debate in EU law of who speaks, whose perspectives matter, whose stories are being told, and how. It argues that this epistemological shift is necessary in light of the existential challenges that the Union faces, both internally and externally.

The reorientation towards centring vulnerabilities, highlighting silences, and investigating the effect of law on people’s lives can also be found in Commission v Hungary, in particular in the discussion of the CJEU on “stigmatisation and marginalisation, which is tantamount to establishing, maintaining or reinforcing the social ‘invisibility’ of some members of society” (para. 555). Similar concerns on (intersectional) stigmatisation and societal belonging have been voiced by AG Ćapeta in earlier opinions as well, for instance, in the Danish Ghetto Law case. Arguably, this orientation towards the social effect of law is not consistent throughout the Court’s case law, even in its values jurisprudence. In fact, scholars arguing in favour of a methodological understanding of European society have problematised the Court’s tendency to favour a homogenous vision of society that levels the diversity of lives and practices existing in the Union rather than accommodating religious, societal, sexual, racial, and cultural differences.

The methodological angle of European society invites a broad range of approaches, not just doctrinal and socio-legal, but also historical, cultural, linguistic, post- and decolonial, feminist, materialist, and queer analyses. It also lends itself to interdisciplinary engagements and interaction, as well as the inclusion of more narrative or creative forms of doing scholarship. Borrowing from a critical theory of society, proponents of this approach apply different modes of ‘critique’ to the law and practice of the EU and, in particular, the CJEU. The central concern here is not only diagnostic, that is, identifying the main challenges and crises the Union and its laws face, but also transformative. This means that by centring the lived experience of EU law, we might become more sensitive to its impact and materiality, engage in reflexivity, and thus create a more inclusive, democratic, and legitimate legal order.

The Role of Scholarship 

Thinking about European society after Commission v Hungary also requires reflection on the role of legal scholarship itself. So far, the debate on European society has been shaped to a significant extent by scholars working in particular institutional settings, most notably at the MPIL and the EUI. While this does not diminish the intellectual value of the analyses, it does call for openness about the conditions under which the concept has emerged.

One aim of this symposium is to broaden the debate. This means opening the discussion across lines of generation, gender, nationality, and disciplinary background. A concept that aspires to capture something about the Union’s very foundations cannot remain confined to a narrow scholarly circle. We are aware that the symposium does not fully realise this ambition. At the same time, we believe that the contributions assembled here significantly widen the range of perspectives on European society by bringing together different institutional affiliations, academic trajectories, and methodological commitments.

At a more fundamental level, the symposium also invites reflection on the relationship between legal scholarship and the European institutions. The concept of European society has not developed in isolation. Some of the scholars who have shaped the debate maintain close relationships with the European Commission and the Court of Justice. This proximity has prompted criticism: that the academic discussion lacks sufficient distance from the institutions, or that it turns scholars into ‘academic allies’ of judicial constitutionalisation. These objections should not be dismissed. They raise important questions about scholarly independence and the boundary between legal analysis and advocacy, extensively debated under the concept of ‘scholactivism’.

This is why the symposium gives ample space to contributions that approach the concept from a critical perspective. The aim is not to shield European society from critique, but to make critique part of the discussion. Scholarship should not merely accompany the Court’s jurisprudence. It should test its limits and expose its blind spots. Understood in this way, European society is not a settled doctrine to be defended but a contested concept that we are only beginning to grasp.

Overview of the Symposium

To do so, this symposium unfolds in three steps. First, we will feature a range of contributions that concern foundational questions on the role, value, and implication of the concept of European society as developed in scholarship, at the CJEU, and at national apex courts, such as most recently the Italian Constitutional Court. Secondly, we zoom into the discussion of ‘pluralism’ as a core value and its meaning for European society. Contributions reflect on the potential and limitation of ‘pluralism’ to protect not only diverse forms of life in the Union but also democracy as such. Thirdly, we open a larger debate on the way ahead for European society by highlighting several so far underexplored dimensions, for instance, on civil society, mutual trust, gender equality, culture, the digital sphere, history, private law, and more. We hope this provides all readers ample sources of reflection for shaping the future research agenda on European society.

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