According to Vauchez (2008), Europeanization through law is one of the most powerful meta-narratives of European integration. Social rights make an interesting field of inquiry since in their case Europeanization through harmonization of laws has been limited to coordination of social security rights as a result of the failure to politically agree on harmonization. At the same time, social rights are an excellent example of a different ideal type of Europeanization identified by Vauchez, namely Europenization through citizens’ legal activism. In the context of social rights for mobile EU citizens, Europeanization is presented by some authors as a case of political will and decisions being by-passed by direct judicial action (citizens) combined with judicial activism (the CJEU). However, direct judicial action and activism remain only partial manifestations of Europeanization, in which case it is important to explore what happens at the national level in order to have a full understanding of how Europeanization works. In this paper we take a series of landmark cases in the field of social rights adjudicated on the basis of EU citizenship to test how Europeanization through law occurs (or not) at the national level. We want to follow up the impact of the Brey, Dano and Alimanovic decisions in three national jurisdictions: Netherlands, Germany and the UK all of which have intimated their intention to change their social policy in respect of EU migrants. National developments will be tested against Shaw’s typology of strategies used by states when attempting to limit the effects of EU law (use resources internal to EU law; use resources external to EU law; attempt to change EU law).
