Abstract
The handling of the euro crisis and the subsequent refugee crisis has sparked a rapid growth of integration-critical parties in virtually all member states. While the popular mobilisation of integration-critical sentiments has diverse roots, a major cause lies in rising social inequalities within and between countries. In an effort to win back popular support for its programme of an ever-closer union, the European Commission, along with the member states, has come to place more emphasis on the social dimension of European integration with the hope of strengthening popular identification with the EU.
However, the road to a socially more active Europe via the development of an activist social policy at EU level is blocked by the traditional determination of the member states to keep the design, management and funding of welfare programmes under their own control, a resolve that, if anything, has been strengthened by the growing electoral popularity of integration-critical movements. Nor is such a road economically necessary. Mounting socio-economic disparities are not primarily the result of globalisation or the primacy of negative integration but of the orientation of the EU’s macro-policy regime that has provided for low growth and high unemployment. Accordingly, the currently dominant strategy of improving performance via primarily microeconomic supply-side measures such as flexibilisation of labour markets, improved employability and social investment in education, training and family-friendly policies will also largely fail to produce the hoped-for results. The most promising road to a more socially equitable Europe instead lies in the change in macroeconomic strategy that effectively stimulates private investment. In practice this may call for a more differentiated form of integration that recognises the differential developmental needs as well as social policy preferences of the member states.
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Notes
- 1.
Source: Special Eurobarometer 418, 2014.
- 2.
Equal opportunities, working conditions, information and consultation of workers, and integration of those excluded from the labour market.
- 3.
Falkner et al. (2005: 349), e.g. found that roughly ¼ of the standards in EU labour law directives are of a nonbinding nature.
- 4.
Eurobarometer surveys have included the question whether decision-making should be national or joint with the EU on the issue of pensions, the fight against unemployment, social welfare and health and social welfare. At the height of the Eurocrisis in November 2011, e.g. 67% of EU citizens held that social welfare should be handled exclusively by the national government with the three Nordic members heading the table (88%) while only in Lithuania (48%) and Cyprus (43%), less than 50% thought so.
- 5.
Hirschman (2013: 276) had already outlined the logic of a social democratic Europe in 1979: “under modern conditions of mobility of capital, the ability of capitalist states to undertake reforms is enhanced by the formation of political-economic units that are large and inclusive enough to make the blocking of reforms through large-scale capital flight impractical.”
- 6.
Indeed in protocol 26 to the TFEU, the member states were at pains to prevent that Article 14 might lead to any form of harmonisation rather than to strengthen EU level competences.
- 7.
Okun’s famous argument of a trade-off between equity and efficiency was published in 1975.
- 8.
Source: AMECO.
- 9.
As van Nispen (2017: 14) has documented, the compliance rate of the Commission’s country-specific recommendations has declined from 37.5% in 2011 to 23.5% in 2016. In part this would seem to be due to the inability to reconcile the priority of fiscal austerity with more recommendation for social investment.
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Notermans, T. (2019). The Social Dimension: The Missing Glue of European Integration?. In: Antoniolli, L., Bonatti, L., Ruzza, C. (eds) Highs and Lows of European Integration. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93626-0_12
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