EU values and the place of European society: an external-focused account

Abstract In the particular world of contemporary EU law, European society has the meaning of a place. Appreciating this requires considering the relationship between European society and another key concept, that of EU values. This relationship is one of mutual balance but also tension: while the latter are abstract calls for offensive action on the part of EU institutions, the former is identified as a concretely located space that must be preserved and defended. The paper begins with a close textual reading of Article 2 TEU, focusing on the provision’s specific architecture. There, European society appears as a singular reality – that of a concretely situated perimeter of social relations that the EU claims as its own – which pre-exists the EU’s institutionality and enables its foundational commitments to the realisation of a series of values. The second and most important part of the paper then contends that this particular arrangement should be understood as a function of the EU’s evolving external ambitions and self-positioning vis-à-vis the outside world. Thus, contrary to the common tendency to see the EU’s external projections as resulting from its own internal identity and dynamics, I will argue that here it is the internal that follows the external. On this basis, it will be shown that the complementary relationship between European society (as place) and EU values (as action) that I identified in the architecture of Article 2 TEU is reflective of the delicate compromise between the rise of the EU’s neo-imperial ambitions at the regional and global levels (for which values serve as a vehicle) and the construction of an increasingly hard boundary between an inside and an outside to the EU order (which the concept of European society serves to draw, justify and implement).