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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.

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.

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.

This paper investigates whether the politicization of a new generation of trade agreements has led to the transformation of EU trade policy. It provides a qualitative study of multilevel contention based on sources from civil society and the parliamentary archives in Belgium, Germany, and the European Union concerning the EU-Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) and three subsequent agreements concluded by the EU with Japan, Vietnam, and Singapore. We argue that, far beyond mere institutional disputes, the contention surrounding CETA has epitomized two conflicting visions of sovereignty: on the one hand, a vision where national executives qua states share sovereignty under the auspices of the European Commission, and on the other hand, a claim to reassert popular sovereignty (and the channelling thereof by parliaments) in a multilevel fashion. We demonstrate that the strengthening of the latter vision has been limited as the empowerment of parliaments was not sustained when civil society’s mobilization waned. The EU institutions have successfully curtailed the category of mixed agreements thus limiting the involvement of national and regional parliaments. CETA was a climax in the politicization of trade yet failed to bring about a new constitutional settlement that enhances the popular component of sovereignty in the EU.

The T-Dem is both important and welcome as it is more important than ever for scholars to engage with political debates, in a perspective that constructively puts forward both specific and ambitious reform proposals, designed to meet the acute challenges the EU is facing. We welcome that the four scholars take this seriously enough to propose an actual draft treaty. This gives some fresh air to the debate on the future of the EU and reminds us that treaties are not set in stone. The main thrust of the present commentary argues that the T-Dem goes far beyond its - admittedly central - proposal for the creation of an Assembly of the Euro area composed of national MPs. We argue that the T-Dem envisions a new parliamentary-intergovernmental political order, as well as a new economic constitution for the European Monetary Union composed of 19 of the 27 EU Member States. We try to assess the practical issues involved in the T-Dem especially in relation with the composition of the proposed new Assembly and the ratification process of the treaty. We try to anticipate the unintended but expected effects of the creation of a parliamentary assembly of the Euro area. We identify where the T-Dem could be further elaborated (the economic constitution dimension) and its main problem area (the relation between the new assembly and the European Parliament). Given the difficulties identified, we finally claim that the alternative consisting in empowering the European Parliament, is preferable.

Contemporary conflicts of sovereignty in Europe have gone beyond the clash between national and supranational sovereignty. Sovereignty conflicts are increasingly occurring within member states. This paper develops a conceptual framework that distinguishes between foundational, institutional and territorial conflicts of sovereignty, elaborating on this taxonomy with reference to the historical evolution of the concept of sovereignty in Europe. It provides an account of why we have seen a proliferation in conflicts of sovereignty within European states. This is due in part to the notion of “shared” sovereignty. Central to European integration, this notion has introduced considerable institutional indeterminacy into the political systems of member states, leading to many of the institutional conflicts of sovereignty we see in Europe today. The struggle of national party systems to institutionalize societal conflict via partisan competition is another contributory factor. This has displaced conflict onto the terrain of how popular rule is institutionalized within the national state. In developing this framework, the paper provides a method for distinguishing between political conflicts tout court and those touching specifically upon sovereignty. Moreover, the framework helps us distinguish between those conflicts of sovereignty most destabilizing for a polity and those which are less so.

Previous chapters have addressed controversies surrounding European social policy by looking at developments in governance, politics and policies following the creation of the EEC in the aftermath of the Second World War, with a particular emphasis on the contemporary period. The purpose of this chapter is to look to the future and assess whether the EU is well-equipped to enable Europeans to manage collectively the social challenges that have been posed most acutely since the turn of the twenty-first century. Since 2008, the EU has experienced a period of turbulence described by political actors (notably JeanClaude Juncker) and social scientists

Contrary to national welfare states, social policy at the EU level focuses primarily on regulation rather than redistribution. However, the EU does pursue a redistributive policy in the form of EU funds, notably the European Social Fund (ESF). Generally, a redistributive policy consists of transferring resources from the wealthiest territories, social groups or individuals to those who are the least well-off, with the aim of reducing inequalities and ensuring a sufficient level of social and territorial cohesion. Typically, this occurs as fiscal revenue is being collected in a central budget, which can then be redistributed in different ways. In the

As in other federal systems such as the United States or Canada, social policy within the EU is not the purview of a specific institution but is shaped in a fragmented way by a multiplicity of actors (Leibfried & Pierson 1995). These sometimes form alliances in public policy networks and communities and depend on each other in the framework of the multi-level governance that characterizes the EU. Yet, beyond legal prerogatives and institutional dynamics, the making of EU social policy is the product of underlying political struggles. As highlighted in the previous chapters, the area of social policy has always