The Price to Pay for Pick-a-Pack Dependency: Consumer Policy and Law Between Internal Market and Digital-Green Economy

In Western democracies, consumer law arose as consumer protection law to protect the weaker parties against manufacturers’ market power, which was disconnected from the parallel rise of environmental protection and environmental law. The consumption society of the 1960s and 1970s, a widespread political conviction in Western democracies, called for regulatory intervention. The beginning decline of welfare state thinking in the late 1970s in Europe and the US allowed the EU to step in to instrumentalize consumer policy and law for legitimating the completion of the Internal Market, hammered down in the 1985 Single European Act. Connecting consumer policy and law to market-building policy enabled the EU to develop a seemingly consistent body of consumer law over the last four decades, setting standards that influenced consumer law worldwide. This is common knowledge. Today, the dark side of EU consumer law and policy dependency from the perspective of market-building purposes can be observed. The dramatic change from the industrial to the digital economy and society led to the rise of a new body of law—EU Digital Policy Legislation, which is about to overrule and undermine the EU consumer law acquis. The process is further enhanced through the politically promoted greening of the economy and society, which puts the tension between consumer law and policy and environmental law and policy into the limelight. The question is what remains for and of consumer law and polity in a digital and green economy and society.