The paper deals with the recent changes in social policy coordination at the European level brought about by the growth strategy ‘Europe 2020’ and the ‘European Semester’. It aims at assessing the repercussions of this new governance structure on domestic welfare states. The main assumption is that the increasing entanglement of thematic and macroeconomic coordination and fiscal surveillance at the European level limits the member states’ authority to pursue an independent social policy, as it results in bringing forward particular social policy reforms at the national level that are in line with EU recommendations. In this regard, the paper both analyses how country-specific recommendations from the European Semester concern the social sphere, and evaluates their domestic implementation. The study makes use of qualitative content analysis of policy documents from the coordination procedure. The empirical analysis takes into account Eurozone as well as non-Eurozone countries and covers the years from 2011 to 2015. The paper demonstrates that European social policy coordination primarily takes place against an economic and budgetary background, which leads to the subordination of social concerns under the overarching aim to stabilize Economic and Monetary Union. Finally, the paper shows that domestic implementation of EU reform proposals varies considerably among the member states – some appear as ‘reform pioneers’ and others as ‘refuseniks’.
