The three parts to understanding the crisis 

What could be better to put major news events linked to the law into a more general and historical perspective than the crises we go through? Because these crises are more societal than economic they are the expression of radical transformations.
What are the historical reasons for this? What ideological evolution led Europe to follow Anglo-Saxon neoliberalism from the 1980s onwards by progressively abandoning the Keynesianism that dominated the dominant Glorious thirties? How can Europe reconstruct itself based on the spectre of a welfare-state that is impossible today? Are we witnessing a rearrangement of the world or a simple reworking of old recipes of liberal democracy? The thirteen articles which make up this work respond to complex questions and are divided into three parts.  

The first contributions to the article deal with the question of the crisis in institutions and government. As we turn the pages we see that public authorities have been overtaken and sidelined. When they are not in competition with each other, they have to confront powerful private players and progressively lose their bargaining power. Where the state provided a framework for the common good and for society, the economic sphere has become its main competitor by embracing the values of self-regulation. Who knows better than economic players to decide what is good for their own equilibrium? To erase this self-regulation which has only led to a race for profit, one of the contributions adopts(2), the approach, somewhere between rational and utopian, of investigating the possibility of making solidarity a principled and constitutional norm for the governance of world trade. After all, if solidarity is restricted to small circles connected by sentiment or common interest, it is because this is a naturally human value.  The researcher identifies this lack of solidarity as a cause of the crisis. She recommends the idea, in these troubled times, of a return to measures that will lead to a new strengthening of interpersonal relationships.

A crisis of norms

The second part is devoted to standards, both from the point of view of their production and the construction of their legitimacy. The action of the state in the production of norms is today weakened by the private sector or by hybrid organizations. Consider, for example, Davos, rating agencies or the ISO (3) (International Organization for Standardization), the largest non-governmental organization generating standards today. The article by Coline Ruwet, which deals with this subject, clearly retraces the tools that these new standardization players put in place in order to ensure that they are permanently legitimate. These tools are epistemic because they are suggested by competent experts, political because they are subject to campaigns of enquiry and democratic approval and economic because they are driven by the needs of the market.

Pressure also exists when the apparatus of the state makes the final decision in the creation of a standard. This is the case particularly with lobbies that are put in place to soften the blow of certain measures that are already in existence. On this subject, Elisabeth De Ghellinck(4) devotes an article to the possibility of applying sanctions to infringements of competition law.

Finally, the production of standards can also occur at the expense of the public sector within its own sphere, by resorting to experts in areas that are becoming more and more technical and complex (health risks, economics, ecology…). These experts are progressively becoming an elite technocracy by ousting citizens and decision-makers from the decision-making process. 

(2) Clotilde Jourdain-Fortier, Professor at the University of Burgundy, Credimi, Solidarity as a principle of governance for the business world: between reality and utopia.
(3) Coline Ruwet, ICHEC Brussels Management School and UCL, The legitimacy of hybrid norms. Arbitration between epistemic, political and market legitimacy.
(4) Elisabeth De Ghellinck, Professor at the Louvain School of Economics, Should we adapt the policy of sanctions to competition law infringements to take account of the context of the crisis?