Towards a ‘Holding Environment’ for Europe’s (Diverse) Social Citizenship Regimes

Abstract

The postwar expansion of the national welfare state produced – as a by-product – a sense of national community on the basis of social citizenship rights. European integration, also taking shape over the period of postwar reconstruction, lacked the accompanying moral force of deepening European community integrity. More perversely, the operational logic of intensified market and currency integration from the 1980s on was intent to ensure that member states held their ‘wasteful’ welfare state in check through economic liberalization, monetarism and balanced budgets. The aftermath of Euro crisis (and Brexit) has exposed that the ‘permissive consensus’ of relegating social policy to the nation state and market and monetary discipline to the EU is past its prime. However, I doubt that adding substance to EU social citizenship is a viable strategy in times of resurgent nationalism. I am also not so sanguine that ‘adding stuff’ to EU citizenship would strengthen any sense of European community. Rather, I suggest a more assertive and transformative institutional role for the EU in backing and bolstering the problem-solving capacities of semi-sovereign national welfare states. The EU should transform its modus operandi from a ‘disciplining device’ to a ‘holding environment’ for national welfare states to prosper, making the EU a proud and tangible union of national welfare states.