Hegemony Critique and the Crisis of the European Union

In the present essay, I argue that the current EU governance reflects a contradiction between the presumption of a European constitutional framework based on human rights, democracy and the rule of law and the recently adopted economic stability governance defined outside the horizon of the EU treaties. I propose to understand this scenario through the prism of two distinct and context-specific assumptions: a political-sociological hypothesis for which internal contradictions of capitalism are thought to be capable of ‘self-displacing’ to other societal sectors (the ‘colonization thesis’) and a political-philosophical thesis for which EU governance is connected to a decrease in democratic legitimacy and right-standards due to hegemonic control by economic powers (the ‘hegemonic control’ thesis). Both hypotheses testify to the lowering of the standards of protection of fundamental rights and member states’ regulatory capacities as well as to an overall de-constitutionalization of the EU architecture.