Introduction to The Politicisation of Social Europe

With the onslaught of the global financial and economic crisis, the European Union (EU) transformed – overnight and contre coeur – from a ‘benign’ project of single market expansion and currency integration into a highly contested political union. The Greek sovereign debt crisis of 2010 that almost brought down the euro fed back into political distrust among the leaders of the Member States, with the European Commission caught in the middle of the crossfire. With the financial crisis turning soon into a deep social crisis, the increasing intrusiveness of the EU into domestic decision-making, especially in those countries under economic adjustment programmes, pushed for a mobilisation of political parties in defence of national welfare states. The track-record of EU crisis management – overly attentive to debt sustainability and competitiveness-led growth strategy – festered a looming sense of social betrayal by the EU and heightened politicisation of EU affairs at the domestic level. Many articles have been published that trace the evolution of ‘Social Europe’ after the Great Recession and the Eastern enlargement. The bulk of this literature has described the development of the social dimensions of the EU in negative terms by referring to the absorption, the displacement, the decline and the marginalisation of EU social policies. They shed light on different domains, including the legislative agenda (Garben, 2018; Kilpatrick, 2018), the coordination of national policies in the framework of the European Semester (Copeland and Daly, 2018; Dawson, 2018) and the financial support provided to Member States via the Multiannual Financial Framework (Avdikos and Chardas, 2016). Particular attention has been paid to the interaction between the economic and social dimension of the EU, and especially on the negative externalities of the former on the latter (Crespy and Menz, 2015; Degryse and Pochet, 2018). Several books, mostly edited volumes, have been published examining the EU response to the sovereign debt crisis and how this has affected welfare state reforms in the Member States. Among others, The Sovereign Debt Crisis, the EU and Welfare State Reform, edited by Caroline de la Porte and Elke Heins (2016); Social Policy and the Euro Crisis, edited by Amandine Crespy and Georg Menz (2015); A European Social Union after the Crisis, edited by Frank Vandenbroucke, Catherine Barnard and Geert De