Since its inception, European economic integration has interfered with the autonomy of Member States in social policy. European welfare states have transformed into semi-sovereign entities, thereby creating an unstable compound in the social protection sphere, which leads to strains in terms of social cohesion, institutional coherence and political legitimacy. If the shocks brought by the Lisbon Treaty and the Great Recession generated unimaginable changes to European policymaking, e.g. through the European Semester, their impact on Social Europe is only slowly being appreciated. With respect to individual policies, the influence was greatest on retirement provision. However, no systematic research analyses where the EU is heading with respect to old-age pensions. This article fills in this gap starting with a qualitative content as well as statistical analyses of European Semester documents between 2011 and 2016, complemented with case study research on the reforms carried out in key Member States. The exercise verifies the following issues left unaddressed by the existing literature. How much do the new instruments devised at European Union level in the aftermath of the crisis undermine the sovereignty and autonomy of the Member States in pension-related policymaking? Comparing the current state of affairs with the pre-crisis situation, which of the three dimensions of the European pension agenda (the internal market, financial viability, social adequacy) have survived the crisis?
