Social Policy On Tomorrow's Euro-Corporatist Stage

In: Journal of European social policy, Band 5, Heft 4, S. 303-315

Abstract

The European Commission's Green and White papers on Social Policy try to promote social security as a precondition of the further success of the European integration. A Euro pean Social Policy is seen as an important con tribution to improve the public acceptance of the European Integration. The article starts with an analysis of the political effectiveness and limitations of this argument. A closer analysis shows that the proposals in the Green and White papers are not entirely clear. They vacillate between supporting full employment and introducing a basic security system. This can be seen as a first reason for the particular selective European Social Policy which is pre dicted in the article. The analysis of the main socio-political actors on the European level underpins this prediction. The important role of the social partners - as targeted in the Green and White papers - combined with the absence of a functioning central political actor (anal ogous to the state on the national level) will result in a specific kind of selectivity, which produces a relatively poor socio-political out put on the European level.