More or less “social Europe”? The challenges of European social policy after the enlargement to include central and eastern countries and the recent economic and financial crisis

Abstract

The paper firstly aims to analyse the historic evolution of European social policy, which has been both significant and incoherent at the same time. Thanks to this evolution, the European Union (EU) was able to build up its own labour and social law system, based on the huge increase in legal competences within the treaties and many directives, capable of partially harmonising the respective legal systems of the Member States (MS). Nevertheless, a high level of incoherence has always been a characteristic of European labour and social law, for different reasons (shared competences, exclusion from EU competences of collective labour law, a high degree of flexibility, etc.), that has made the harmonisation process very weak. This weakness—aggravated by the enlargement to include the Central and Eastern countries—was probably one of the reasons why European authorities decided to deal with the labour and social side of the recent economic and financial crisis in a way which has completely abandoned harmonisation, pushing through the adoption of national reforms by some Southern MS that were severe and generally perceived as a disintegrative element within the EU context. Against this background, the paper secondly tries to assess the impact of the economic and financial crisis and these national reforms on the future of European social policy, underlining that it could be very negative (de facto leading to the marginalisation of the harmonisation process) but also considering the recent efforts made by the European Commission to relaunch this policy through the so-called European Pillar of Social Rights. This assessment will be conducted taking into account that the social dimension of the EU is currently highly contested, even with regard to one of the most important successes of European social policy, i.e. the regulation of free movement of workers (more precisely: of persons), considered in many countries as encouraging “social tourism”.