ABSTRACT
The EU and its institutions have never explicitly endorsed a particular economic model for the internal market. Socialmarket economies were therefore those that blended capitalism with social objectives, and acted as a compromise between classical socialist and liberal economic models. This chapter explores the concept of the 'social market economy' from a historical perspective and discusses how this concept balances two seemingly anachronistic values: the social and the market. It examines how this concept of the 'social market economy' and 'Social State' are context dependent, and that based on a historical view of the Union's constitutional development. The chapter looks at the specific constitutional provisions which reinforce this trend, and the ways in which EU constitutional law has continually impacted on the social policies of its Member States despite having very few express competences in the social fields.
