Whose Social Europe? - The Laval/Viking Judgments and the Prosperity Gap

Abstract

The paper explores and critiques the current consciousness in the EU legal academia and legal profession when thinking about rights and free movement and about the relationship between Eastern and Western Europe. It shows the foreclosure of the development concerns in the discourse of the European Court of Justice in the Laval judgment and argues that the current perception of the dichotomy between rights and free movement is inadequate in EU legal thinking and in legal discourse in general. It shows an important imbalance between the rhetoric of goods dumping and social dumping in EU legal discourse. Furthermore, I argue that the language of free movement sometimes actually helps the weak and therefore remain skeptical about the EU legal profession's optimism about the introduction of social rights in the EU Charter of Rights.

Keywords: Laval, Dichotomy, Social and Free Movement, Social Dumping, Goods Dumping, Central Europe, Social Rights, Charter of Rights, European Union, European Court of Justice