This contribution traces the development and the politics of the idea of the inclusion of citizens in the financial market and in particular in the credit market. It shows that financial inclusion is fundamentally meant to perform both an economic and a social function and describes how that idea has been understood and implemented specifically in the multi-level European system. The policy of financial inclusion as understood at the European level is strongly characterized by a market rationale that is mostly concerned with granting access to the credit market and, as is now emerging more clearly, ensuring the stability of that market. The social function remains on the contrary less developed. Given this framework, the negative consequences of the inclusion of citizens in the financial market, which can manifest themselves as a form of social exclusion, have to be faced primarily by the law of the Member States, although this is bound to have repercussions at the supranational level.Resumé: Cet article décrit le développement et la politique de l'idée d'inclusion des citoyens dans le secteur financier et plus précisément dans le marché du crédit. Il montre que cette inclusion financière est fondamentalement destinée à remplir une fonction à la fois économique et sociale et décrit comment cette idée a été comprise et mis en oeuvre spécifiquement dans le système européen à plusieurs niveaux. La politique de l'inclusion financière tel que comprise à l'échelle européenne est fortement caractérisée par une logique de marché principalement concernée par l'accord de l'accès au marché du crédit et plus récem-ment la stabilité financière, alors que la fonction sociale reste moins développée. Dans ce cadre, les conséquences négatives de l'inclusion des citoyens dans le marché financier, qui peuvent se manifester comme une forme d'exclusion sociale, doivent être atténuées principalement par le droit des États membres, bien que cela aura des répercussions au niveau supranational aussi.

Six years into the global economic and financial crisis, many European countries have suffered profound economic, political, and social repercussions. Governmental and constitutional crises, high levels of public debt, the adoption of austerity measures, unprecedented levels of unemployment, and the spreading of poverty have marked many European societies. While the EU is in a process of reexamining the whole design of the banking system with far-reaching political and institutional consequences, the impact of the economic crisis on indebted consumers, and specifically those with mortgages, has been much less discussed. The Working Paper presents the result of a research on the effects of the financial and EURO crisis in six European countries within and outside the Eurozone (Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Portugal, Romania, and Spain) having in common that they received international bailout loans under the condition of implementing intrusive austerity measures. In those countries consumers are still facing increasing levels of (over-)indebtedness and struggle with the effects of the crisis, both in financial and social terms. In this light, the studies pay attention to both the social reality and the legal change which is undergoing as triggered by legislative reforms and judicial decisions. The studies also lay open the shortcomings of a EU consumer policy which is largely based on the image of the reasonably circumspect consumer who is supposed to be autonomous, self-reliant, and reasonably well informed. In this regard, the EU suffers from a clear internal market bias that promotes and requires easy access to consumer and mortgage credit, without paying sufficient attention to the possible drawbacks in terms of social exclusion.

No abstract

See the numerous publications stemming from the Common Core of European Private Law project initiated in Trento; among many: M. Bussani and U. Mattei (eds.), The Common Core of European Contract Law. Essays on the Project (The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 2002). 4 This has mostly interested the area of EU consumer law. See e.g. H. Schulte-Nölke, C. Twigg-Flesner and M. Ebers (eds.), EC Consumer Law Compendium. The Consumer Acquis and its transposition in the Member States (Sellier, 2008). 5 The academic debate on the Draft Common Frame of Reference has generated a vast amount of literature.

The article discusses how the emergence of a policy of financial stability in international and European economic law has an impact on private relations, leading private law itself to become an instrument of financial stability. The result is an intersection of financial regulation and private law whereby financial regulation addresses consumer protection top-down and private law addresses financial stability bottom-up. The incorporation of the goal of financial stability nonetheless creates tensions in private law, since the latter aims at further objectives, occasionally leading to conflicts. The article shows how the accommodation of those objectives requires the striking of balances, and discusses instances in which case law of European courts arbitrated between different interests producing dissimilar results in different contexts. This casts further doubts on the consistency of the notion of financial stability as a policy or legal principle; despite its prominence at the international and European level, it unfolds in different forms depending on the interests at stake.