1 Queens Papers on Europeanization No. 1/2000 EU Social Policy: Institutional Design Matters

This paper challenges the view that European social policy is relatively unimportant as it plays second fiddle to the mainly market-making orientation of European integration. Such a position portrays an overly binary approach to the development of Social Europe: if the EU fails to build pan-European institutional structures that rescue beleaguered national social systems, then the penalty will be the Americanisation of the European labour markets. The paper develops a more pragmatic account of the European social development. It suggests that EU social policy has had important but uneven influences on the labour market regimes of the member-states. This uneven impact is explained by the multiple-equilibrium character of social policy-making in the EU