While the European Union (EU) professes a commitment to liberal democracy, in recent years it has allowed some member governments to backslide toward competitive authoritarianism. The EU has become...

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The European Union's authoritarian equilibrium

‘Collective Autonomy in the European Union’ explores the question of collective autonomy by investigating the relationship between collective bargaining and legal regulation and its current evolution in the national contexts and in the EU internal market. The thesis aims at achieving a comprehensive understanding of the notion, function and exercise of collective autonomy and collective bargaining, and it argues that collective autonomy and collective bargaining in contemporary Europe present challenges that alter their basic features. To this end, the thesis undertakes a multifaceted analysis integrating three perspectives: a theoretical perspective analysing and combining the conceptual elements of collective autonomy and collective bargaining as defined in industrial relations theories, labour law theories, and in the discourses on global labour rights; a comparative perspective analysing how collective autonomy and collective bargaining have found legal regulation in the Italian and Swedish labour law and industrial relations contexts; a cross-border perspective examining how the EU regulation of the internal market freedoms of establishment and to provide services impacts on the features of collective autonomy and collective bargaining.By combining elements of international, European and comparative labour law, EU internal market law, and industrial relations, this thesis explores the unique features of collective autonomy and collective bargaining as socio-economic mechanisms having a normative power, whose functioning is however influenced by legal dynamics. Eventually, it examines the transformation that the foundations of collective autonomy and collective bargaining undergo in relation to the challenges deriving from both the processes of company-level decentralisation and the dynamics of the cross-border scenarios in the EU internal market. Ultimately, the thesis contributes to advancing the understanding of the foundations of collective autonomy and to exploring its operations beyond national borders. (Less)

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Collective Autonomy in the European Union: Theoretical, Comparative and Cross-border perspectives on the Legal Regulation of Collective Bargaining

Part I. Introduction: 1. Introduction 2. What is health law? 3. What is European Union health law? Part II. EU Internal Health Law: The Individual Focus: 4. Consumerism: the moving patient 5. Consumerism: the moving health product or service 6. Consumerism: the moving health care professional 7. Rights: health rights as human rights 8. Rights: mobile patients' rights as human rights Part III. EU Internal Health Law: The Systemic Focus: 9. Competition, solidarity, equality: health insurance 10. Competition, solidarity, equality: health institutions and professions 11. Competition, solidarity, equality: the pharmaceuticals, medical devices and medical equipment industries 12. Risk: clinical trials 13. Risk: health system products - pharmaceuticals 14. Risk: health system products - human blood, tissue and cells, organs medical devices 15. Risk: tobacco, food, alcohol Part IV. EU External Health Law: 16. The global context: institutions and instruments 17. The global context: consumerism, rights, justice and equality: human organs and access to essential medicines 18. The global context: opportunities and threats: health knowledge, communicable diseases, global food and tobacco law Part V. Conclusions: 19. Conclusion.

European Union Health Law: Themes and Implications

Health services policy in the European Union is at a critical juncture: a moment at which decisions are highly contingent but, once taken, will shape politics and policy for the future. There is no established EU health services policy community or trajectory because EU health services politics have been a reaction to decisions by the European Court of Justice. Instead, there are a range of different models of health policy, each with different logics, lineages, policy tools and bureaucratic sponsors. The decisions taken in this fluid situation will shape future policy because of the importance and `stickiness' of the EU. Once the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has taken a decision or legislation has been passed, it is difficult to undo. This article explains the challenges that created an EU policy arena where none had been; the reasons that decisions taken now will be subject to the logic of path dependency; and the different models that are being put forward for the EU.

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Choosing paths in European Union health services policy: a political analysis of a critical juncture

Two models of regulatory competition are contrasted, one based on a US pattern of ‘competitive federalism’, the other a European conception of ‘reflexive harmonisation’. In the European context, harmonisation of corporate and labour law, contrary to its critics, has been a force for the preservation of diversity, and of an approach to regulatory interaction based on mutual learning between nation states. It is thus paradoxical, and arguably antithetical to the goal of European integration, that this approach is in danger of being undermined by attempts, following the Centros case, to introduce a Delaware‐type form of inter‐jurisdictional competition into European company law.

Christopher Townley

Papers

Cambridge Yearbook of European Legal Studies