The European Social Question

Tackling Key Controversies

Amandine Crespy

• Publisher: Agenda Publishing
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781788213608
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique sociale

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.

1

WHAT IS THE EUROPEAN SOCIAL QUESTION?

The European social question concerns both the past and the future of the EU. Compared to other countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), European citizens enjoy the highest level of social protection in the world. Yet, over the past three decades, social cohesion in Europe has been tremendously challenged by economic, technological and demographic change. All European countries are experiencing the degradation of the welfare state (albeit at different paces), the persistence of old and new forms of poverty and the rise of social inequality. The re-commodification of social rights has affected all advanced capitalist economies in the wake of financial capitalism. Against this background, how should we assess the role of the EU and what does it suggest going forward? Has the EU enhanced or, on the contrary, undermined social cohesion? Should its competences in this realm be strengthened or curtailed?

“Solidarity”, “equality between men and women” and “full employment and social progress” feature as main principles in the Treaty on the European Union (TEU). Incrementally, the European Community – later the EU – has created new transnational rights for mobile workers and citizens, and it now has a considerable body of regulation based on the principle of non-discrimination. At the same time, the coming of age of a social union in its own right has remained elusive, and the promise of upward convergence was not kept. As the latest financial crisis has shown, what we have been witnessing is a widening of the gap between the continent’s wealthy core and its peripheries. The humanitarian crisis provoked by the austerity pushed by the Troika in Greece (see Chapter 3) will remain a dark episode in Europe’s history. With the outbreak of Covid-19 in January 2020, Europeans have had to face new challenges. The circulation of the virus led to the suspension of some fundamental liberties granted by the EU, such as the freedom of movement across countries. Although governments and the EU alike have rediscovered the importance of robust healthcare and educations systems – among other collective goods and welfare services – they have had to learn to act jointly vis-à-vis international pharmaceutical corporations to ensure the vaccination of the European population. Last but not least, a historic recession is in the process of unfolding, as most European economies have been put on hold for over a year at the time of writing.

This chapter will lay the groundwork for addressing the European social question and the controversies surrounding it. After presenting the key concepts relating to EU social policy, it will provide a brief overview of the explanations advanced in the literature to explain the weakness of EU social policy-making. The final section looks at the various normative perspectives on the European social question. Ultimately, whether or not the EU should be held accountable for ensuring social justice also depends on what (if anything) binds Europeans together.

Grasping the social question from different conceptual angles

A range of concepts are relevant to the European social question. They differ from each other in that they examine the question from different angles: at the micro/individual, meso/institutional level or macro/polity level. This introductory chapter cannot do justice to the long intellectual history of such concepts. Our purpose is rather to provide some conceptual milestones and to explain how they can be understood in the context of the debates over EU social policy.

Inequality, justice and solidarity

Evidence for the persistence of social inequality in Europe is often the starting point for raising the European social question. A vast body of research in economics and sociology has documented the fact that, since the 1980s, the social gap between the rich and the poor has increased within all advanced capitalist economies (i.e. OECD countries). This is mainly due to the engrained dynamics of financial capitalism that led to the concentration of capital and wealth at the very top of the social ladder. While inequality is mostly conceived of in terms of income inequality, other factors such as disposable income before and after taxation, property wealth and access to public services (such as education and healthcare) should be considered to draw a more faithful picture of social inequalities. In Europe, “the Gini coefficient¹ increased on average from 0.28 in the 1980s to 0.30 in 2014” (OECD 2017: 8), indicating an increase in social polarization across the board with the 10 per cent richest people in Europe earning 9.5 times more than the poorest 10 per cent.² Of paramount importance for grasping the European social question is the analytical distinction between (vertical) inequality within European societies, on the one hand, and (horizontal) inequality between or across European societies, on the other (on the latter, see the section on “cohesion and convergence” later in this chapter). When combining vertical and horizontal forms of inequality, it is possible to distinguish three broad social classes across the continent (Hugrée et al. 2020): the working class (43 per cent of the European active population), threatened by global financial capitalism and unemployment; the privileged class (19 per cent of the European active population), a relatively homogeneous group of very mobile individuals with high cultural capital; and the intermediate class (38 per cent of the European active population), a mixed group with different orientations. While the majority of the working class is to be found in the south and east of Europe as well as in rural areas, the intermediate and privileged class is more present in the north-west of the continent and is mainly urban.

Tackling social inequality is fundamental to attaining social justice, which is a normative goal whose meaning remains disputed. Notwithstanding, John Rawls’s theory of justice has been key to shaping the contemporary conception of social justice in Europe. Reduced to its most basic expression, it relies on fairness and reciprocity in sharing the duties and benefits of social cooperation (Rawls 1971). Whatever that may imply for the EU – this being controversial – it is important for the EU’s legitimacy that a majority of Europeans believe that the EU is working to reinforce rather than undermine justice among Europeans.

The struggle against inequality and attempts at social justice at the European level need to be rooted in a sense of solidarity among Europeans. Solidarity is a fundamentally ethical concept that goes beyond moral duty or legal obligation. Relying on a sense of fraternity, solidarity does not exist in natural (i.e. ethnic) communities, but in political – or artificial – communities cemented by trust in predictable reciprocity (Habermas 2013b). For all that, solidarity should not be conflated with altruism, but is rather in tune with the fulfilment of one’s long-term self-interest (Habermas 2013b). Whereas solidarity is mentioned multiple times in the EU treaties, it is unclear to what extent it has actually materialized into the kind of social relations that bind Europeans today. The normative, legal and institutional underpinnings of European solidarity are at the heart of today’s controversies surrounding European integration (Coman et al. 2019).

Social rights and social citizenship

The EU (previously the EEC) has consistently asserted the ambition of protecting and enhancing individual social rights, albeit in a limited and sometimes ambiguous fashion. In this perspective, a non-binding Community Charter of the Fundamental Social Rights of Workers was adopted in 1989 to address trade unions’ demands in terms of working conditions and access to employment. In 2000, a European Convention proclaimed a European Charter of Fundamental Rights, a sort of Magna Carta or Bill of Rights of the EU, which incorporates social rights into a wider body of personal, civil, political and social rights and affirms their indivisibility. In doing so, it deepened the existing social rights (e.g. work–life balance or equality between men and women), on the one hand, and created new ones (e.g. the integration of people with disabilities, or the ban on child labour), on the other (Jacquot 2014: 204).

However, the jurisprudence of the CJEU based on the interpretation of the charter reveals that the court has implicitly established a hierarchy between rights whereby social rights belong mostly to the category of fundamental principles rather than genuine rights. This means that they are only invoked if they have already been established in European or national legal provisions (Kenner 2003).

Fundamentally, the notion of social citizenship remains attached to membership in the national community. At the European level, citizenship manifests itself as a market-based citizenship granting rights to individuals as economic agents (workers) as necessary for the development of the single market. Thus, the thin, or even invisible, social dimension of European citizenship has time and again been underlined in contrast with the thick notion of national social citizenship embedded in welfare states (Strath & Magnusson 2004). More specifically, however, European social citizenship can be considered as “nested” in the complex functioning of a multi-level, multi-tiered federal polity (Faist 2001).

EU social rights thus mostly materialize as European citizens are granted access to social rights and protection when they live in a place that is not their country of nationality. The 2004 so-called citizenship directive³ extended access to the social protection enjoyed by workers to economic inactive categories of people (e.g. retirees or students). Yet, national governments remain powerful gatekeepers who, under the pressure of vivid popular fear of alleged “welfare tourism”, have imposed increasing restrictions to access for migrant EU citizens. This trend has been backed by the CJEU. All in all, the openness of national welfare states has remained limited and a pattern of stratification has emerged among EU citizens depending on their individual status, resources and country of origin (Bruzelius & Seeleib-Kaiser 2019).

Welfare states and the European social model

Welfare states find their origins in nineteenth-century Europe (and notably Germany under the chancellorship of Otto von Bismarck) where social protection for the poor and workers started to develop. The welfare state can be defined as the institutionalized form of solidarity within a society based on regulations and the redistribution of resources through a common budget. From a political point of view, the size and shape of the welfare state is the result of confrontations and compromises between various social groups and territories within a state. The emergence of social protection has played a key role in the legitimation of modern states, both before and after the Second World War.

In his seminal book The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, the Danish sociologist Gosta Esping-Andersen (1990) distinguishes three models of welfare states in Europe, namely the liberal model, the conservative model and the social democratic model; a typology that was later enriched with a southern or Mediterranean model (Ferrera 1996) and an eastern post-communist model (Kuitto 2016) (see further discussion in Chapter 2). More recently, research has shown that welfare states have been incrementally reshaped by neoliberal retrenchment or social investment while conserving their historically entrenched features (Palier 2010). This book focuses on policy-making at the EU level rather than on the comparative analysis of welfare state reform in Europe. However, the effects of EU policies can only be understood in terms of their differentiated impact across countries as they are “filtered” by historically and culturally rooted national welfare states.

Given the diversity of national welfare states, scholars have contested the very existence of a European social model and the challenges it has faced since the 1990s (Careja et al. 2020; Ebbinghaus 1999). The phrase, attributed to Jacques Delors, who was president of the European Commission from 1985 to 1954, has a political connotation meaning that, beyond their specificities, national social models are united by a high level of social protection and an ambition to strive towards social progress rooted in the history of Europe. Although the notion of a European social model has no legal or institutional existence, it is reflected in the values proclaimed in Article 3.3 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU).⁴ Since the dawn of the twenty-first century, some scholars and politicians – notably Mario Draghi when he headed the ECB in 2012 (Wall Street Journal 2012)– have claimed that the European social model had been extinguished by economic downturns or that it had proved regressive in its actual content (Barbier 2015).

EU socio-economic governance and Social Europe

The socio-economic governance of the EU is at the core of the controversies tackled here. Rather than a homogeneous policy area, social policy at the EU level consists of a complex patchwork of procedures and instruments. It is key to note that, on the basis of EU treaty provisions, the EU has limited competences in social policy as the bulk of competences and financial resources remains with national states.

From a legal point of view, the nature of the EU’s social policy competences – mainly laid down in Title X of the TFEU – are twofold. According to Article 153, the EU has a shared competence in a number of areas, in which it is entitled to adopt binding legislation via its ordinary legislative procedure. In other areas, it only has a supporting competence, meaning that it can only help coordinate the actions of national governments through non-binding recommendations.

Thus, EU social policy consists of a set of public policies in diverse areas, including workers’ mobility within the single market, labour law, employment policy, anti-discrimination (including gender equality), the fight against poverty and social exclusion, public health and social protection (including pensions and healthcare). Across these fields, the EU can use a range of instruments rooted in different modes of governance, namely regulation, the social dialogue, redistribution through funds and soft coordination. Furthermore, the EU’s socio-economic go...