Suchergebnisse

Abstract
The EU's Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) represents a bold integrationist step in European economic governance. Besides the size of the fiscal envelope, the novelty also lies in the new governance. Member states prepare integrated investment and reform plans and need to fulfil milestones and targets to access funding. This article assesses the balance of power in negotiating the plans and the effect on domestic policymaking. Based on five case studies, we show that the RRF has enhanced the steering capacity of the European Commission on reforms and investments, while member states remain ultimately in charge of the plans. Second, we argue that, while the RRF enhances the efficiency of the policymaking process and allows the fast-forwarding of reforms, it has also led to a contractualization of the relationship with the EU and a centralization of decision-making processes within member states. This latter aspect may hamper ownership and legitimacy in policy implementation.

AbstractBy providing financial resources, conditional to the implementation of the (social) recommendations in the Semester and the principles of the European Pillar of Social Rights, the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) has opened new political and institutional opportunity windows for the multi‐level co‐production of social policies. The article first dives into how the RRF has been translated into national social policies choices, by assessing the alignment of reforms and investments with the Semester social recommendations and their capacity to address the social vulnerabilities identified in the Pillar's Social Scoreboard. Second, it sheds light on the interaction between the European Commission, in charge of assessing and monitoring the RRF, and the national governments, the key actors in setting‐up and implementing the plans. Comparing six case studies (Italy, Germany, Spain, Croatia, Belgium and Austria), the article shows that the RRF has only partially contributed to reinforcing member states' compliance with social Country Specific Recommendations and the role of the Social Pillar in the drafting of National Recovery and Resilience Plans has been very limited. This notwithstanding, the RRF has contributed to fasten‐forward the implementation of welfare reforms and initiatives which would have been remained on the paper, especially for whose countries with limited fiscal capacity. Furthermore, it provides empirical evidence of the collaborative approach between the Commission and the national government, substantiating the claim of the emergence of a new mode of coordinative Europeanization.

This paper presents a reconstruction of the evolution of the EU social agenda from the late 1990s. It shows that – despite being uneven and at times truncated – EU advocacy for social investment as a new social policy paradigm has been increasing over the years. The paper then questions how such advocacy affected European citizens' social rights. Building on two novel databases, which systematically collect information on all EU legislative (binding and non-binding) provisions as well as EU case-law from the end of the 1990s up to 2021, this paper explores EU social investment rights by looking at the power resources that are guaranteed to individuals. It emerges that, despite the broad, coherent, and rich framework for social investment principles offered by the EU, resources allocated to citizens remain quite limited. Citizens are not legally entitled to any specific social investment right, except for work-life balance-related parental and care leaves. Enforcement channels are also only limited to paid leave related issues. Instrumental resources to facilitate access to social investment services are mostly limited to mobile EU citizens.

AbstractIn September 2015, the European Commission launched a new political initiative ‐‐ the European Pillar of Social Rights (EPSR) ‐‐ with the stated aim of strengthening the social acquis of the European Union and promoting upward social convergence across eurozone countries. In January 2017, the European Parliament voted in a resolution supporting the EPSR. This article examines the positioning of the parliamentary political groups to grasp the tensions that emerged during the debate. In so doing, it provides empirical evidence of the existence of a complex 'clash syndrome' in European social policies which results from the combination of vertical and horizontal forms of euroscepticism. The main argument is that the coexistence of multiple political tensions may hamper the development of a stronger Social Europe, but may also lead to the emergence of new political coalitions through the 'criss‐crossing' of different lines of conflict.

Is the EU evolving towards a Re-Insurance Union? The creation of SURE, an EU financial tool to support national short-time work (STW) schemes in the midst of the pandemic, has revitalized debates on fiscal stabilizers as a means to counter economic downturns and protect jobs within the European Union. Drawing from document analyses and 17 interviews with EU and national stakeholders, this study explores the politics underpinning SURE's adoption following a decade of heated and unsuccessful debates on the European Unemployment Reinsurance Scheme (EURS). Through the lens of 'purposeful opportunism', the article illustrates how the European Commission leveraged prior EURS insights and the emerging consensus on STW schemes to craft SURE in a way which addressed national concerns about EU-wide welfare harmonization, while positioning the EU as a holding environment for national welfare states. Looking ahead, making SURE a permanent 'second line of defence' against macroeconomic shocks could contribute to further substantiating new, EU-wide, social rights codified in the European Pillar of Social Rights.

When does the EU employment growth agenda also serve social progress? Scholars concerned with the equality/efficiency trade-off generally look at the EU as an agenda-setter. Little attention has yet been paid to its role as direct provider of social rights. Building on a data set of 71 EU measures and 317 judgments of the Court of Justice of the EU, this article evaluates the extent to which EU employment policies helped to advance social citizenship by assessing the scope and distribution of individual entitlements over time (2009–2022). Our findings show that, after almost two decades of silence, the EU not only expanded the scope of its influence over individual social rights but also took an inclusive turn, driven by more 'universalising' and 'capacitating' initiatives. Looking ahead, better monitoring of the distributive profile of EU initiatives indirectly affecting rights production (such as SURE or the Recovery and Resilience Facility) would help to ensure that this shift increasingly benefits those needing it the most.

This introductory article to the Special Issue Marshall in Brussels? A new perspective on social citizenship and the European Union first argues that there is a need for a novel systematic framework that captures the increasingly complex web of relationships between the European level and the national and local levels in the creation and implementation of social rights. It then summarizes the contributions of the articles included in the Special Issue, starting with the first article that provides such a novel framework, a power resource-based and multi-layered conception of social rights which looks at social rights as bundles of three key power resources: normative, enforcement and instrumental resources. It then shows how the other articles apply this framework when analysing a variety of issues related to European social citizenship. Finally, it sums up the main contributions of the Special Issue: its contribution to the further development of power resource theory; to the theory of social citizenship; and to capturing how social rights in the EU increasingly result from the creative assemblage of different resources provided by different actors and levels of government, resulting in a 'marble cake' pattern akin to that existing in historical federations like the US or Switzerland.

The launch of the European Pillar of Social Rights has reinvigorated the debate on the role that the European Union can exercise in the sphere of subjective rights. Such debate has traditionally focused on the limits of the current social acquis, considered unable to create fully-fledged European social citizenship, that ultimately remains limited to the right to reside and freely move within the EU and enjoy social rights as nationals. Conversely, this article argues that the gradual expansion of the EU's social acquis has slowly but clearly started to disconnect social rights from their exclusive national foundations, leading to the emergence of a new marble cake pattern of right production, which to a large extent reproduces the trajectory of federal polities. To capture this development, this article proposes an original analytical framework to dissect the notion of social rights as bundles of power resources (normative, instrumental and enforcement), which enable individuals to claim and actually receive material benefits in order to cope with a codified array of risks and needs. By shifting the attention from the formal dimension (laws and their enforcement) to its concrete practice (access and outputs), our conception connects the concept of social citizenship more directly to what ultimately matters for life chances (individualised material benefits) as well as for the social and political bonds of a community (the rights-based claim and experience of social protection). In so doing, we move beyond the boundaries of the nation-state as the only producer of social entitlements and are able to appreciate the increasing relevance of the European Union as a provider of power resources and guarantor of policy outputs.