INTRODUCTION AND OVERALL THEME

European Contract Law has been affected by mega-developments in society of the last decade in multiple ways. These range from the digital revolution that led to a host of EU legislation, both regulation of individual contractual relationships and of markets and platforms, to a similar revolution with respect to sustainability, which, again with EU legislation as the dominant layer, has led deep into contract and adjoining company and capital markets law as well. Many authors consider these two as the mega-trends of today's law of the enterprise – with the particular characteristic that regulation, company law and banking law are intertwined in particularly dense ways with contract law in these new mega-topics. Much less central in the apprehension of a larger contract law public in Europe is a development that had been triggered by the first mega-crisis in Europe in this decade, the Global Financial Crisis (followed by a whole series of mega-crises in Europe). This development, however, can well be seen as being just as important and indeed pointing in a similar direction. Moreover, it may even predate the other developments named. It may well be that the European Banking Union – created as a response to the global financial crisis (in 2008) and to the Euro sovereign debt crisis (in 2010) – constitutes the first instance of a decidedly common (public) good oriented reform. In other words: this may well be the first instance of a public good trend in the areas where autonomous party decisions typically reigned supreme, a trend that can be seen as a fundamentally new ‘green box approach’.m