Social Europe, the road not taken

• Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies
• EGPP: European Governance and Politics Programme

Whatever happened to Social Europe? Did the European Left manage to influence the evolution of European integration since WWII?

Based on new archival research, this book examines the European Left's attempt to think about and give shape to an alternative type of European integration during the long 1970s. It shows that the Western European Left – in particular social democratic parties, trade unions, and, to a lesser extent, ‘Eurocommunist’ parties – formulated a project to turn ‘capitalist Europe’ into a ‘social’ or ‘workers’ Europe’. During the pivotal years following 1968, deeply marked by labour militancy, new social movements, economic crisis, and the unmaking of the ‘post-war compromise’, a window of opportunity opened in which European integration could have taken different roads. The defeat of ‘social Europe’ was a result of a decade-long social conflict that ended with the affirmation of a neoliberal Europe.

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