Abstract Subject to conditions that public law can secure, social conflicts can be normatively appealing for their dividend in terms of dynamism, identity and stability. While this notion was key to post-World War II European public law, it no longer holds true now that social conflicts are increasingly marginalised by the expansion of supranational law and its consensus culture. However, far from disappearing social conflicts re-emerge as challenges to the current institutional setting, even despite the policy of constitutional gesture undertaken by EU institutions. This paper tracks the role of social conflicts in European public law and argues that as long as EU politics fails to embrace a culture of social conflicts, challenges to the authority of EU law can be normatively justified.