From Economic to Social Hardening: The coupling of coordinative Social Policy and Financial Conditionality

„NextGenerationEU“ (NGEU) with the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) at its core is widely seen as a game-changer in EU crisis management tackling the consequences of the Corona pandemic but also as a potential critical juncture for economic and social integration (Kollias and Zouboulakis 2020; Ladi and Tsarouhas 2020). While some authors see NGEU as a new era of economic and social governance, other researchers argue that the coupling of the RRF with the European Semester leads to a technocratic hardening of EU social policy soft law under the umbrella of flexible austerity (Höpner 2021). Both views point to a realignment of distributive social policy, which we will examine in more detail in this article: the closer coupling of distributive measures and soft law/coordination. So far there are few studies that systematically examine its effects on European social policy: Did the coupling really lead to a hardening, especially of the Social CSRs, in the European Semester? And does it primarily mean a further economization of European social policy through financial conditionality? We first outline the role of distributive social policy in the context of the EU. We then use the literature on hardening and softening of EU governance in order to systematically analyze the coupling of the two instruments, differentiating between the degree and the direction of hardening/softening. In the empirical part, we examine the period from the beginning of the global financial crisis to the adoption of the RRPs within the framework of NextGenerationEU on the basis of document analysis and expert interviews. We suppose that the increased coupling of distributive means and coordinative measures does neither lead to a linear hardening of social policy nor to pure economization, but has gone through various hardening/softening phases including a potential for positive conditionality in the sense of ‘more’ social policy.