Contestation and accommodation: constitutional and private law pluralism(s) in the EU

This chapter aims to demonstrate that there are certain structural and theoretically significant similarities between constitutional and private law pluralism in EU law. While EU legal scholarship has been animated by the idea of constitutional pluralism for years, relatively little has been said about private law pluralism. We think this is a mistake. The central claim of this chapter is that – if constitutional pluralism is understood in a wider sense – the difference between constitutional and private law pluralism is one of form and not of substance. Once this is done, the pluralist vocabulary perhaps loses some of its distinctiveness and allure as a conceptualization that explains the specificities of European constitutional (dis)settlement; however, as we shall argue, what is gained is a more comprehensive analytic framework that is able to account for the multiplicity of interactions between European and Member State legal, political, and evaluative structures, and which is capable of integrating public and private law pluralisms into one coherent narrative.