The Solidarity Principle in New EU Member States

The chapter aims at assessing how the legal traditions of the new EU member states (formerly planned economies) and the EU legal system impacted on country differences to deal with redistributive aims and approaches. This is primarily done by analysing the provisions included in their Constitutions related, directly or indirectly, to the principle of solidarity. After having discussed the historical roots of the solidarity principle in Europe, the author goes on discussing how modern European Constitutions formally internalized these historical roots. Then she explains that the Legal Origin Theory approach is not exhaustive in explaining the role played by the Solidarity Principle in the modern Constitutions in the light of the EU membership, due to the spill-over effects of European legal tradition and to the role of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) and of the EU legal framework. This obviously applies to the new EU member states too, since their Constitutions had to be aligned with the basic principles underpinning the EU systems, as clearly shown in the case studies examined (Poland, Hungary, Romania and Lithuania). The chapter concludes that the interplay between national Constitutions, EU legal framework and the right to free movement of EU citizens implicitly shapes a peculiar EU-wide social welfare model.