#Demandjustice and Dieselgate: How a Transnational Civil Society Coalition Rocks the Legal Systems in Europe

The paper deals with the conflicts associated with the so-called “Dieselgate” affair over emissions manipulation in diesel cars which started in Germany’s largest car company Volkswagen. It explains the complex interaction of civil society, firms, law firms and political actors in the context of the European system of multi-level governance which reshapes the legal systems in the member states. Once political actors had decided that European owners of manipulated vehicles, unlike US-American owners, should not get any kind of financial compensation, the conflict shifted from the political to the legal arena. At the European level a transnational coalition of consumer organizations and law firms from different member states initiated the #demandjustice-campaign in order to coordinate the protest and to counteract the political decision. So far, they collected ten thousands of lawsuits from different European countries, e.g. Germany, France, Belgium, Spain and Portugal. Whether American law and “Adversarial legalism” as a judicialized style of conflict resolution is spreading to Europe (“Eurolegalism”), has been a hotly debated topic in political science for several years. The Volkswagen case of transnational legal mobilization in the sense of “class-action-style-lawsuits” with law firms as key actors fosters the debate not only because of its social movement character, but also because it shapes the transformation of the legal systems in the European member states. For example, in Germany legislative changes are discussed that make it easier to pursue collective redress in civil courts, although many political actors are quite reluctant. This corresponds with the intentions of the EU commission which has tried to strengthen class action models already for quite some time. As a result, the transformation process towards “Eurolegalism” is intensified.