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Abstract
In the domain of social protection and social policy, a conventional way of trying to document “Europeanization” has always been to track European English policy discourses at the EU level and in the nations of Europe. Notions that crystallize the normative orientations promoted in the forums of political communication and in the policy communities are numerous. All of them are crafted in English and travel across national forums of political communication and national scientific forums. The present paper selects two such notions, i.e. “activation” and “flexicurity” and carefully studies the locus of their inventions and the travels across many countries and many forums – national and transnational. The precise documentation is based on participation in numerous forums, field studies in Denmark, Germany, France, the United Kingdom and Italy over a long period (1997-2008). The findings are all relevant for this period, i. e. prior to the upheaval of social policies at the EU level and in the member states provoked by the financial and economic crisis. They have in common to identify the dissemination of a standard discourse and the resilience of national substantive choices and roles of actors of social protection and labour market policies. Because the paper is written with hindsight, taking stock of the late 1990s and early 2000s, a de facto comparison unexpectedly becomes feasible with the crisis period (2008-2014). The counterfactual is easy to design: a powerful Europeanization of systems of social protection and labour markets has happened in this second period, via the highly constrained implementation of structural reform and budget cuts programmes deemed to satisfy macroeconomic and macrofiscal orientations decided at the EU level, especially within the Eurozone, and especially in the Southern member states. Whereas the Europeanization of discourse and social policy concepts remained superficial in 1997-2008, actual and hard Europeanization really bit deeply since the crisis into national arrangements, even affecting international and European labour law.
Highlights
RESUMEN En el ámbito de la protección social y de la política social, una forma habitual de intentar ilustrar los procesos de “europeización” ha sido la de rastrear los discursos políticos europeos en inglés a nivel de la Unión europea y de los estados nacionales
If we focus on Europe, the problem is different: we are bound to hesitate between a “big picture” strategy, that privileges common features at a very high level of abstraction, and a qualitative and precise inquiry into national – or even sub-national – empirical realities, which are all differing to a certain extent
The “Europeanization” of labour markets and social protection systems is often inferred, by the same persons, from superficial comparison and the conclusions of “flexicurity studies”: elements of “flexicurity” are deemed to be present here and there, in the United Kingdom and Poland, or Rumania for that matter. It is not possible within the space devoted to this paper to substantiate our claim in comprehensive empirical detail, our contention is exactly at the opposite: whereas, using a precise comparative research design leads to identifying clear common trends, the main conclusion of in-depth empirical inquiries shows that national markets and national systems keep their specific traits and resist more profound “Europeanization”
Summary
At a certain level of abstraction, all things are the same: as the great comparatist G. The world will be populated with “vacche grigie” (grey cows) (Sartori, 1991a:35) Such an assessment may apply to “welfare” programmes and systems, employment contracts, their qualities, and the normative frameworks into which they are embedded. These have been increasingly and extensively compared across Europe for the last 20 years, especially in the wake of the European Employment Strategy since 1997. We will concentrate on “activation” and “flexicurity” as two emblematic examples These show that Europeanization has not yet bitten very deeply into the national systems. We will turn to investigating the conceptual story of “flexicurity” in order to see whether the promotion of the concept at the EU-level, with the help of certain actors in certain countries, has resulted or not into the creation of a European hybrid of labour market
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