Drawing from socio-logical and socio-legal scholarship, preliminary consideration is given to the concrete ‘societal problem, need or demand that prompts a legal intervention or the creation of a legal institution’ (Cappelletti, Mod Law Rev 56(3):282–296, 1993), to then explain the contribution of distinct social fabrics on constitutional change. For this purpose, the contemporary European social, cultural, political and economic context are discussed, in a comparative—spatio-temporal—perspective. In particular, looking at the most pressing issues within our society from such a perspective, a series of underlying common trends and features can be uncovered. It is herein argued that they can be traced back to two main phenomena, mutually dependent under a causal viewpoint: globalisation, on the one hand, and technological innovation, on the other hand. Such phenomena are, undoubtedly, the common, pervasive and entrenched traits of the current age. The result is a contemporary framework in which time and space are shrunk and ‘exploded’ in a tangled multi-directional relational network primarily guided by economic and financial interests, in which new players arise and distances between all players, under new power-balances, accumulate. The repercussions on the enforcement of fundamental rights are both substantial and pressing, under the constitutional perspective herein of interest, as addressed subsequently.