For decades, scholars and politicians alike have been sceptical about the feasibility (or even desirability) of EU involvement in welfare and labour policy, as the Union has lacked strong competences, become more heterogeneous with successive waves of enlargement and faced disruptive political and economic shocks. Nonetheless, the EU has decidedly expanded its role in this domain in the shadow of the Great Recession and COVID-19, as it has adopted legislation on decent work and family leave, embedded questions of social inclusion and decent employment into its economic governance architecture, and set up novel financial mechanisms to ‘buffer’ national welfare states. This dissertation puts these developments in a longer-term perspective to understand the genesis and evolution of the EU’s social acquis.
Building on 130 interviews with policy-makers, a large corpus of policy documentation and secondary sources, the dissertation unpacks the agenda-shaping and decision-making behind EU social and labour market policies from the ‘golden age’ of the 1990s, through enlargement and the sovereign debt crisis, via the post-crisis recovery, to the aftermath of the pandemic. I find that this emancipation of social Europe has been driven by a select network of social democratically aligned politicians, officials, trade unionists and experts that have placed new ideas on the agenda and crafted coalitions to sustain these priorities. At the same time, the pattern of social integration has been contingent on the capacity of national and EU policy-makers to draw lessons – from one another and from the past – about the future of welfare state and labour market arrangements, and to gather consent for these social initiatives in an attempt to reinforce the Union’s legitimacy in times of politicisation and dissensus. These factors, I conclude, give notable staying power to the EU’s social agenda, even in a more right-wing environment preoccupied with the quest for ‘competitiveness’.
Sven Schreurs is a PhD candidate at the European University Institute. His research focuses on the agenda-setting and decision-making processes behind the historical and present development of social and labour market policy at the European level, as well as the implications of the EU’s social agenda for the governance of work and welfare in the legal and institutional settings of different Member States. His work has appeared in the Journal of European Public Policy, European Union Politics, the European Labour Law Journal and the Journal of International and Comparative Social Policy. He has been a visiting researcher at the Institut d'études européennes in Brussels and the Hertie School in Berlin and has taught courses at Heinrich Heine University (Düsseldorf) and the University of Montenegro.