Towards a ‘Holding Environment’ for Europe’s (Diverse) Social Citizenship Regimes

Anton Hemerijck

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-89905-3_46

Abstract

AbstractThe postwar expansion of the national welfare state produced – as a by-product – a sense of national community on the basis of social citizenship rights. European integration, also taking shape over the period of postwar reconstruction, lacked the accompanying moral force of deepening European community integrity. More perversely, the operational logic of intensified market and currency integration from the 1980s on was intent to ensure that member states held their ‘wasteful’ welfare state in check through economic liberalization, monetarism and balanced budgets. The aftermath of Euro crisis (and Brexit) has exposed that the ‘permissive consensus’ of relegating social policy to the nation state and market and monetary discipline to the EU is past its prime. However, I doubt that adding substance to EU social citizenship is a viable strategy in times of resurgent nationalism. I am also not so sanguine that ‘adding stuff’ to EU citizenship would strengthen any sense of European community. Rather, I suggest a more assertive and transformative institutional role for the EU in backing and bolstering the problem-solving capacities of semi-sovereign national welfare states. The EU should transform its modus operandi from a ‘disciplining device’ to a ‘holding environment’ for national welfare states to prosper, making the EU a proud and tangible union of national welfare states.

Highlights

Bauböck’s rejoinder to Ferrera’s opens by explicitly acknowledging that EU citizenship was conceived ‘by stealth’ by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in the slipstream of the Maastricht Treaty
Like Marshall before him, believes that social citizenship does provide individuals with an elementary right to economic opportunity and security, through poverty relief, universal access to health care and education, labour market services, unemployment, sickness and old age insurance, but that social citizenship encourages a sense of community membership and belonging, referred to by Marshall as sharing ‘to the full in the social heritage and to live the life of a civilised being according to the standard prevailing in society’
As these institutional breakthroughs were negotiated at a time when the ‘supply side’ revolution in economic theory was riding high, their architects generally believed that the Single European Act (SEA) and the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), and associated budgetary rules, would force member states to keep their ‘wasteful’ welfare states in check

Summary

Introduction

Bauböck’s rejoinder to Ferrera’s opens by explicitly acknowledging that EU citizenship was conceived ‘by stealth’ by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in the slipstream of the Maastricht Treaty.

Results

Conclusion