The Social Market Economy: Origins and Interpreters

Following the European Council which was held in Lisbon in March 2000, the heads of state or government launched the so-called “Lisbon Strategy”, with the objective of making the EU most competitive economic area in the world and to achieve full employment by 2010. This ambitious strategy has been developed over the years and today we can say that it is based on the following three pillars: an economic pillar, a social pillar and an environmental pillar. With particular reference to the first pillar, it is widely believed that the process of European unification, the establishment of “independent authorities”, the creation of an economic area informed by the principle of competition that, starting from Rome, via Maastricht, reaches in Lisbon, have received a special impetus from the reflections of so-called German “Ordoliberals” of the first half of the twentieth century. The most original contribution of the Ordoliberals was to attack the problems of the competitive market from an “institutional approach”: the order of competition is in itself a “public good” and as such should be protected. According to Viktor J. Vanberg, the constitutionalist perspective on the market brings the Ordoliberals of the Freiburg School in line with the institutional research of James Buchanan, who universalized the liberal ideal of voluntary cooperation, transferring it from the scope of market choices to that of institutional choices.