Introduction: The Pursuit of Social Europe in the Face of Crisis

Abstract

Whatever happened to Social Europe? Does the concept still exist? And, if so, what does it entail? Though the 1957 Treaty of Rome establishing the European Economic Community was a document to a remarkable extent infused by economic liberalism, the market-building exercises in the early decades of the Community’s existence were to some extent balanced by the concomitant elaboration of market-correcting instruments, such as the European Social Fund and later the Common Agricultural Policy and its associated guidance funds. Generalizing broadly, the early years of European integration were thus characterized by the paradigm of ‘embedded liberalism’, combining the pursuit of gradual liberalization of trade with protective and redistributive measures associated with the more organized, coordinated, and thus ‘embedded’ model of Western European capitalism.