Social policy without politics? Social Europe between de-politicization and economization

If anything, “social Europe” has long been the subject of intense discussions. In a chapter of a forthcoming book, we argue that looking at the discourses produced about social Europe in historical perspective reveals how the understanding of the “social” in the European Union has been framed – and that this casts light on some of its shortcomings today. Since the 1980s, two concepts were widely used to describe the European social dimension: the European social model and the social market economy. A chronology of the occurrences of both terms in the plenary debates of the European Parliament (EP) reveals that both concepts have emerged as successful ways of defining social Europe roughly at the same time, starting from the late 1980s, and have been widely used until today (even if since 2003 European social model seems to have become more used than social market economy). Our research finds that while these two concepts were used at the beginning with different – and even conflicting – purposes, they increasingly converged towards a de-politicized and economized conception of the “social”, whereby the primary aim of social policy becomes the promotion of employment