Enhancing the Visibility of Social Europe: A Practical Agenda for ‘The Last Mile’

Abstract

The contribution deals with the ‘catalogue’ of suggestions Ferrera has made to make EU social citizenship more visible and salient. As widely acknowledged in the literature, social policy institutions have historically served key political functions for state and nation building purposes in Western countries, including in federal systems, where social citizenship has been used as an element to foster unity. Within the EU’s multi-level framework, the possibility to exploit the legitimating and credit claiming potential of supranational social programmes for polity-building and maintenance is undermined by two elements: on the one hand, the small size of the EU social budget and, on the other hand, the indirect way of functioning of supranational programmes that makes social Europe scarcely visible to citizens at the “last mile” of the implementation chain. This contribution addresses the latter issue, by discussing some initiatives going in the direction of empowering and making the stakes of European social citizenship more tangible, also for non-mobile EU citizens.