'Social Market Economy' as Europe's Social Model?

Abstract

continues to search for its - - model and the, search seems to become increasingly urgent. It is no longer just the democratic deficit, but also and alongside it, the social deficit of the EU which needs to be cured. That new concern is, in fact, a rejection of the older answers. According to the ordo-liberal interpretation of the European legal order as an Economic Constitution and, successively, in the analyses of the EU as a Regulatory State, the sphere of policy was to remain a domain of the nation state. This seems to have become impossible. Constitutional Treaty, indeed, makes a new commitment: The Union shall work for a Market Economy. This paper submits that this commitment is conceptually a failure, and politically not credible. Convention preparing the Constitutional Treaty has apparently ignored the meaning of the concept in the form in which it was shaped in Germany's post-war period. This history entails some pitfalls for the Convention's intentions, as the German Social Market Economy involved not only a claim of integrating concerns into the market economy, but also served to restrict claims for instruments of policy remarkably at the same time. Moreover, the Convention has failed to confer a new and independent content to the concept of the Social Market Economy, which could help to overcome the concept's ambivalent history, as well as the Union's real social deficit. few innovations, the Charter's Fundamental Rights and the Open Method of Co-ordination, were incorporated in such modest and non-committal forms that their potential to further the case for social Europe seems marginal. paper concludes that the invocation of the Social Market Economy in the Constitutional Treaty is conceptually flawed and is politically an all too risky promise which may raise expectations which it will subsequently fail to deliver.