Constitutional Borderlands: NextGenerationEU in the Struggle for Europe‘s Future

University of Connecticut, School of Law

The European Union now finds itself in a liminal space — a „constitutional borderlands“ — between its traditional role as a prodigious producer of regulatory norms and a nascent, yet incomplete, role that seeks to develop fiscal capacities to achieve its goals. The NextGenerationEU (NGEU) program and the model of governance it initiated is at the heart of this shift. Professor Lindseth‘s new book, Constitutional Borderlands, co-authored with Professor Päivi Leino-Sandberg (Helsinki), provides the first comprehensive analysis of the design, implementation, and evolution of the NGEU model. The book argues that the model‘s core elements — national planning, performance-based financing, and enhanced Commission discretion — have had profound distributive and democratic consequences that risk eroding the EU‘s already fragile legitimacy, creating a system unable to meet future challenges.

Peter Lindseth is a legal scholar and historian who teaches at the University of Connecticut School of Law (USA), where he is the Olimpiad S. Ioffe Professor of International and Comparative Law and Director of International Programs. His research and writing focus on European integration and the comparative origins and evolution of governance structures and public law more generally. He is the author of European Integration in the Constitutional Borderlands: the NextGenerationEU Model and the Struggle for Europe‘s Future (OUP 2026), Power and Legitimacy: Reconciling Europe and the Nation-State (OUP 2010), as well as many other publications. 

Lecture as part of the Max Planck Hub Fiscal and Social State series