Social Rights under the European Constitution: Comparing Ideal-typical Models of European Federalism. WP C.S.D.L.E. "Massimo D'Antona" N. 29/2005

[From the Introduction]. The current discussion on fundamental social rights within the context of European constitutional reform is stimulating and rich. Fundamental social rights have been at the centre of a rich and imaginative academic and political debate since the end of the 1980s and particularly during the 1990s (see amongst others Däubler 1991; Lord Wedderburn 1995; A. Lyon-Caen and Simitis 1993; Rodríguez-Piñero, Casas 1996). Labour and social security lawyers have intensively participated and contributed to this debate, invoking and stimulating constitutional reform at European level (see especially Bercusson et al. 1996; Blanpain, Hepple, Sciarra, Weiss 1996, and the so called Simitis Report: Commission EC 1999). More recently, the focus of attention on social rights in the European constitution has been on the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (EU) and its prospects for incorporation in Part II of the draft Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe (see Kenner 2003b; Sciarra 2004). Much of the most recent debate on the constitutionalisation of fundamental social rights at the highest normative level of the European legal order has been about the legal relevance and normative weight of EU social rights vis à vis the fundamental market freedoms traditionally guaranteed by the Community economic constitution (Poiares Maduro 1998; Baquero Cruz 2002; Sciarra 2003). The issue of re-balancing negative and positive integration (Scharpf 1999) by protecting fundamental social rights on par with economic freedom and free competition principles has re-gained momentum with the Nice Charter and with its insertion within the new European constitutional Treaty approved by the 2004 Intergovernmental Conference