Over recent years it has become increasingly clear that the European Union is falling short of its promise to enhance social cohesion across the continent. Welfare state modernization has been at the ...centre of divisive debates over the redistribution of wealth and imbalances between a wealthy European core and its peripheries. Some see the policies and governance of the EU as part of the problem, others rather as the solution. This book examines the key issues facing the EU’s social policy-making. Each chapter focuses on a single challenge and explores the arguments and considerations that coalesce around it. The book helps students and researchers alike to understand how the EU operates and shapes social policy on multiple levels, and to better assess the EU’s role in supporting social cohesion.
Criticism of the EU's social deficit has become more vivid than ever following the socially regressive handling of the 2008-10 financial and debt crisis. In 2010, Fritz Scharpf famously argued that ...the EU 'cannot be a social market economy' owing to its institutional architecture, legal features, and collective action issues. The COVID-19 pandemic has nevertheless led to a new agenda combining investment, social concerns, the green transition and more fiscal solidarity. However, a lot remains to be done, it is argued, to bridge the social gap. A three-pronged model is outlined to conceive of the EU's role in enhancing national, inter-national and transnational social cohesion. The paper furthermore points to where the EU's action must be intensified to make significant progress on the way to a competitive and social market economy. In many respects, the hard political battles remain to be fought.
Since 2009, austerity and the pressure for decreasing public spending in Europe have strongly targeted welfare services such as transport, healthcare, social services, culture and education, etc. In ...order to understand the current situation of welfare services in Europe today, one must take a step back and look at the broader development what has been the role of the EU in the marketization of public services? And to what extent has contestation mattered in that regard? From an institutionalist point of view, the EU has exhibited a bias towards negative integration, that is policies relying on competition and marketization. This is explained by the building the Single Market through liberalization directives and the institutional strength of competition law. Yet, legal and institutional factors (including case law) do not have a deterministic, mechanic effect on policy making. One needs to look at the political battles surrounding welfare services, and especially mobilization of left wing political actors (including radical left or social democratic parties, trade unions, and associations from the global justice movement) against marketization policies. Main contentious episodes have included protest against the EU Services directive, the campaign calling for an EU Framework directive on welfare services, and the global mobilization against the General Agreement on Trade in Services. The study of politicization through coalition formation and discourse provides evidence that politicization could occasionally able to slow down or hamper marketization. Yet, the EU has consistently acted as a catalyser for the marketization of welfare and continues to do so. Today, in the aftermath of the Eurozone crisis, austerity and marketization are two sides of the same coin.
Over recent years it has become increasingly clear that the European Union is falling short of its promise to enhance social cohesion across the continent. Welfare state modernization has been at the ...centre of divisive debates over the redistribution of wealth and imbalances between a wealthy European core and its peripheries. Some see the policies and governance of the EU as part of the problem, others rather as the solution. This book examines the key issues facing the EU's social policy-making. Each chapter focuses on a single challenge and explores the arguments and considerations that coalesce around it. The book helps students and researchers alike to understand how the EU operates and shapes social policy on multiple levels, and to better assess the EU's role in supporting social cohesion.
In the face of the coronavirus pandemic, the German government embraced a major shift towards a grants-based EU recovery fund relying on common European debt. How can we explain this impetus, ...especially in view of the reticent German fiscal stance in previous years and in the early stages of the pandemic? To elucidate this question, this paper provides a qualitative inquiry into German preference formation during the spring of 2020. Theoretically, it reconciles liberal intergovernmentalist and discursive accounts of preference formation in the context of EU politics stressing the intertwined nature and simultaneousness of preference formation in the national and European arenas. We hypothesise that, along with material self-interests, the construction and framing of the pandemic as a certain type of crisis was key. Examining the stances taken by the federal government, commercial groups and key EU actors such as France and the European Commission, our findings point to a rapid preference realignment in German political and economic circles. Overall, the analysis suggests that especially in times of crisis, assumed national preferences are subject to reconfiguration thus allowing for contingent political responses.
This paper investigates why and how French and German leaders converged on an agreement for reforming the European Monetary Union in response to the outbreak of the debt crisis in Europe. To answer ...these questions, we begin by revising Putnam's two-level game in order to offer a constructivist account of the politics of 'grand bargains' in the European Union. The Eurozone negotiations, we argue, are better viewed as a simultaneous double game in which preferences are constructed and reconfigured as leaders address simultaneously the other European decision makers and their own constituencies. In a discursive institutionalist perspective, a frame analysis is conducted on the basis of press conference speeches and press interviews in 2011 and 2012. It is demonstrated that the Franco-German agreements on new policy and institutional arrangements were only possible because the respective leaders resorted to differing discourses in terms of paradigms, norms and values.
This paper deals with the ideas underpinning the EU’s socio-economic governance by focusing on the notion of structural reforms in the framework of the European Semester. It asks which policy ideas ...are constitutive of the notion of structural reforms in the EU and whether said meaning has changed over time to tackle slow growth and rising inequalities. Our demonstration is mainly grounded on a content analysis of all European Semester documents since 2011 (including Annual Growth Surveys, Alert Mechanism Reports, Euro Area Recommendations, and Country-Specific Recommendations) and completed by a short series of interviews with European and national officials involved in the European Semester. We find that, despite floating meaning, the notion of structural reforms exhibits a persisting core consisting of typically neoliberal policy recipes such as the liberalisation of products and services markets, the deregulation of labour markets, and public administration reform. At the same time, structural reforms have covered eclectic—if not contradictory—policy ideas, thus accompanying a discursive turn towards more fiscal flexibility and (social) investment. Rather than a constructive dynamic towards a renewed agenda, such ambiguity, we argue, reflects a fundamental, asymmetric ongoing battle of ideas within the EU.
The notion of ownership is well known in relation to global governance. In the realm of EU macro‐economic coordination, it has become a buzzword since the revamping process of the European Semester ...in 2015. This article investigates how ownership by four types of domestic actors (governments, administrations, parliaments and social partners) manifests itself in the European Semester. We conceptualize three types of ownership, namely institutional, political, and cognitive. Using network analysis, semi‐structured interviews, and a small‐scale survey, we find that ownership is strongest among governments and administrations which are able to shape the outputs of the European Semester (institutional ownership) with little political disagreement (political ownership). While national parliaments display low levels of all types of ownership, employers and unions exhibit relatively strong cognitive ownership. We conclude that the European Semester remains a bureaucratic process contributing to building a multi‐level administrative space rather than an arena for political debates.
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