Social Policy: Still an Area of National Sovereignty?

Abstract

This panel seeks to investigate how the European Union influences national social policy in the wake of the Great Recession. It focuses on three phenomena: the activist role of the ECJ, which broadens the existing coordination regime and alters welfare state solidarity; the revival of the Community method through the Lisbon Treaty, leading to further harmonization. The coordination of social security rights, which facilitates worker mobility, is an old affair. Recently, however, this regime has been expanding social rights to a widening group of EU citizens, largely due to the ‘activist’ interpretive role of the ECJ. The covered social protection areas concern not only cash benefits, ranging from pensions to family allowances, and student money, but also benefits in kind (welfare services), to which the literature has devoted far less attention. The underlying principles and the implementation across Member States of recent ECJ judgements are of particular concern to assess their impact on the evolution of welfare state solidarity. Already before the Great Recession, the rules governing the EU have implicitly given a greater mandate to European institutions to steer Member States’ social policy. Lisbon has relaxed the exacting voting requirements in the Council applicable to social questions, thereby providing fewer opportunities to form blocking minorities. The Commission embraced the notion that social and economic integration are just two sides of the same coin and that neglecting national welfare systems is not an option any longer. Moreover, it has sensed that that the subsidiarity and proportionality principles have been eroded in several domains. The result is the development of encompassing discussions on aspects of welfare, such as old-age pensions, that were only recently firmly in the hands of national policymakers.

Title	Details
Implementing Union Solidarity in the Nordic Welfare State	View Paper Details
Pan-European Social Solidarity in the Wake of Recent UK Welfare Reforms	View Paper Details
Social Legislation in the EU? A Longitudinal Analysis	View Paper Details
Europeanization of the Danish Welfare State? ECJ Cases on Family Benefit and Student Allowance	View Paper Details