Two decades of change in Europe: post-crisis social policymaking in the EU

摘要: The European Union’s contextualization of ‘social policy’is contained within the realm of employment and social affairs. As such, social policymaking is fundamentally intertwined with the employment opportunities and prospects for people living and working in the Member States (Cram 1993, 1997; Hantrais 2007; Daly 2019). This understanding of social policy–which emphatically links social rights to education, training and labour market opportunities–is partly the result of the mixed competences of the EU in this area, with Member States responsible for most archetypal social welfare policies such as providing social assistance, unemployment benefits, pensions, health care and education. The EU, by contrast, is mostly involved in those dimensions of social policy that have an impact on the functioning of the single market, namely in the realm of employment (Gold 1993; Rhodes 2010). These dimensions include health and safety at work, coordination of social security systems, and the rights of mobile workers within a mobile labour market, all of which were driven first by the push for market integration and later by the need to build a common foundation to support the free movement of workers in an expanding single market (Falkner 1998; Anderson 2015).Whereas this broad division of competences between the national and EU levels largely left the more visible applications of social policy–ie those to do with direct benefits or services–with Member States, the interaction between domestic and supranational levels of competence became increasingly fuzzy with the onset of deeper integration triggered by EMU (Economic and Monetary Union …