Article 2 TEU contains two postulates: first, that the Union is founded on a set of values common to the Member States; and second, that this commonality of values manifests itself in, or even constitutes, a society. The CJEU began to treat the values enshrined in that article 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, in paragraphs 551, 554 and 556, the existence of a European society.

This contribution approaches the matter from a social-science point of view. From such a perspective, the Treaty’s stipulation of value commonality and of a society recognisable by that commonality is best understood as a programmatic claim. Such claims are open to empirical scrutiny. In what follows, I will argue that individual values acquire their meaning only within wider value systems, and that these value systems differ substantially across the Member States. I will also question whether a society can be sufficiently identified by reference to value commonality alone. Treating the claim in Article 2 TEU as established is, in my view, unconvincing and politically dangerous.

Individual Values and Value Systems

Political science and sociology have brought about a vast body of research on value formation and value change. The big bang was Ronald Inglehart’s 1977 book “The Silent Revolution”. Inglehart observed a shift unfolding over several decades across Western industrial societies: a shift away from materialist values such as security, law and order, and economic stability, and towards post-materialist values including self-determination, non-discrimination, and environmental protection, to name only a few.

It is important to understand what is at stake in such processes of value change. The point is not that materialist values have turned into their opposites: that people begin to prefer insecurity over security, disorder over order, or an unstable economy over a stable one. As Inglehart put it:

“Postmaterialists are not non-Materialists, still less are they anti-Materialists. […] The emergence of Postmaterialism does not reflect a reversal of polarities but a change of priorities: Postmaterialists do not place a negative value on economic and physical security – they value it positively, like everyone else; but unlike Materialists, they give even higher priority to self-expression and the quality of life”. (Modernization and Postmodernization, p. 35)

Individual values derive their meaning from their position within overarching value systems. The very same value may be balanced quite differently depending on the value system in which it is embedded. Within such systems, priorities may shift (The Silent Revolution, pp. 99-115). According to Inglehart, this is what occurred in Western industrial societies during the post-war period of prosperity. Certain values gained relative weight vis-à-vis others, thereby reshaping value systems as a whole.

Why Europe’s Value Systems Differ

This insight matters for the debate on Article 2 TEU. The relevant question is how values such as those listed in Article 2 TEU are embedded and balanced within the wider value systems of the Member States. The values invoked in that article sound largely uncontroversial. Hardly anyone, when asked in surveys, would reject freedom, democracy, or solidarity as positive values. We may therefore be tempted to conclude optimistically, in line with Ursula von der Leyen, that “the European Union is a community of values” (cited in Atlas of European Values, p. 5). A different picture emerges, however, once we consider the counterweights to the Article-2-TEU values within the Member States’ value systems. The 2021 Special Eurobarometer on “Values and Identities of EU Citizens” is informative in this regard.

If EU citizens are asked, for example, whether religion is important to them, and the results are then aggregated by Member State, levels of agreement range from 16% in Sweden to 80% in Cyprus (see Appendix Table 1 in the Eurobarometer). With regard to identification with one’s ethnic background, the range stretches from 29% in Luxembourg to 87% in Portugal (Appendix Table 27). The Member States also differ profoundly in the extent to which citizens identify with their sexual orientation, their region of origin, or their nationality (Appendix Tables 29, 33, 34). Even in the case of self-identification with one’s family, something one might intuitively regard as a near-universal value, remarkable differences emerge, ranging from 67% in Belgium to 93% in Spain (Appendix Table 37). The Article-2-TEU values are therefore balanced against markedly different countervailing values across the Member States. As a consequence, the value systems within the European Union differ substantially.

What, then, are the implications for our debate? Claims about a common value basis across the Member States should be treated with considerable caution. If this alleged commonality is invoked to demonstrate the existence of a European society, that conclusion, too, should be approached with caution. And if the existence of a European society is in turn meant to legitimise the competence creep advanced by the CJEU in Commission v Hungary, then that legitimacy becomes all the more doubtful.

Beyond that, the inaccurate claim is dangerous in a very practical sense as well. The CJEU’s new case law on Article 2 TEU is premised on the assumption that the Article 2 values are already common across the Union, and all that remains to be done is to ensure compliance through a central judicial authority. But if that assumption is mistaken, then a jurisprudence aimed at giving effect to this alleged commonality turns into a jurisprudence aimed at producing such commonality in the first place. Greater convergence among the Member States’ value systems would make things easier, no question. Yet the idea that value heterogeneity across Member States can be levelled out through CJEU intervention is naïve and potentially destructive. Rather than overcoming divisions between the Member States, it risks deepening them precisely at a moment when European cooperation is geopolitically more necessary than ever.

What Makes a European Society?

Let us, in a thought experiment, assume a high degree of value commonality across EU Member States. The inference from shared values to the existence of a common society would still face a fundamental problem. What if Canadian and German societies had rather similar value systems, too (that is really the case, see this graph from the last wave of the World Values Survey)? Would we conclude that a Canadian-German society exists? Of course not. Shared values may well constitute a precondition for successful societal integration, but they are by no means a sufficient condition, as the example makes clear. What is plainly missing here is spatial proximity. The idea of a European society must therefore be assessed against indicators that go beyond necessary but insufficient conditions.

But which criteria should those be? There is no shortage of candidates: redistributive practices across Member States, the emergence of a shared public sphere, patterns of cross-border mobility, and so forth. Even if we were able to agree on all relevant criteria and measure them, we would still face a threshold problem. No one would dare to name the precise point at which an entity of people turns into an integrated society. Yet if I were forced to choose a single indicator of societal integration at gunpoint, I would turn to the great sociologist Émile Durkheim.

In the famous preface to the second edition of “The Division of Labor in Society”, published in 1902, Durkheim (pp. xxxi–lix) elaborated an idea whose basic contours can already be found in §§ 250-256 of Hegel’s “Elements of the Philosophy of Right”, namely that intermediary organisations perform an indispensable function of social integration. They act as mediating institutions situated between the individual and the state. A society lacking such intermediary structures, Durkheim argued, could only be conceived as a “serious anomaly” (Durkheim p. lv).

“A society made up of an extremely large mass of unorganised individuals, which an overgrown state attempts to limit and restrain, constitutes a veritable sociological monstrosity. […] A nation cannot be maintained unless, between the state and individuals, a whole range of secondary groups are interposed.” (ibid., p. liv)

Durkheim’s insight can be made fruitful for the debate on the existence of a European society. When Durkheim spoke of intermediary groups as agents of societal integration, he primarily had professional associations in the tradition of medieval corporations and guilds in mind. Yet his argument can easily be extended to other mediating collectivities: chambers of crafts and commerce, trade unions, employers’ associations, political parties, and public-law bodies.

What do we see when we approach the EU from this perspective? Certainly, more than nothing. We find a confederation of European business and employers’ associations (BusinessEurope), an organisation representing public employers and providers of public services (SGI Europe, formerly CEEP), the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC), the European umbrella organisation of consumer associations (BEUC), as well as European political parties. These entities may indeed be interpreted as signs of an emerging process of European societal formation. But that is only one side of the coin.

The other side of the coin is that the degree of internal integration within these organisations remains fairly modest. Intermediation continues to be concentrated primarily at Member State level, where it takes markedly different forms, especially in the field of labour relations. The same holds true for the European political parties, which to this day remain rather loose alliances marked by limited programmatic cohesion. As a result, they struggle to present voters with clearly distinguishable political programmes that would allow for meaningful electoral choice. The structures through which societies articulate and mediate collective interests thus remain predominantly national.

Conclusion

One can, of course, work with definitions of “society” so broad that the requirement of an integrated whole almost disappears and the whole world becomes, by definition, a “world society”. But such definitions convey little insight. Using intermediary organisations and institutions as indicators of societisation, we could speak of a European society once they have ceased to operate within national containers and the mediation of collective interests takes place predominantly at Union level. Readers may have better suggestions. I do not insist on mine; I simply failed to come up with a better one. What I do insist on, however, is that the Article-2-TEU claim of a European society based on common values does not hold water. The claim is theoretically unconvincing, empirically untenable, and politically dangerous.

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