The Future of Social Rights in Europe: In between Nostalgia and Hopefulness

Abstract

This article attempts to assess the future of social rights and the welfare state in Europe. It perceives the current state of social rights in the context of a shift from the post-war compromise of embedded liberalism and democratic capitalism. This shift embodies the obstruction of the achieved relative harmony between social forces and capitalism through a change in national and global institutional structures. The assessment of potential future trajectories of social rights in Europe will be conducted through a close engagement with the debate between two prominent German thinkers, namely, Wolfgang Streeck and Jurgen Habermas. The debate portrays different pictures of an institutional landscape deemed necessary for the protection of social rights by each account. The first picture stems from an account based on the reversal of the emerging and new institutional structures. The second account, however, conceives the European Union (EU) as the appropriate institutional paradigm for the protection of social rights.Both approaches are understood to entail currently non-existing social assumptions. This refers to a changed social structure in relation to Streecks reversion-based account and to non-existing factors for the mobilisation of forces required for reform initiatives in the case of Habermass EU based approach. Navigating between these understandings, the deficiencies of each account in the provision of a framework for the effective pursuance of social rights will be noted. These deficiencies in turn guide our analysis in the identification of potential fora of contestation for the active pursuance of social rights.