Oldal 66 [66]
64 | Zsófia Kollányi
The choreography of the economic and the social debate in European
discourse is such that the economic dimension is considered as the baseline
until the point when some crisis shifts attention to the issues related to social
tensions, resulting in urgent demands from pro-social actors calling on the
Union to act in order to mitigate these problems. And the EU usually does take
action — not necessarily in ways that are seen as satisfactory by all, however.
Certain employment-related rights were mentioned already in the Treaty of
Rome, along with the common goal of establishing the European Social Fund
(Dodo 2014). At the same time, however, these served more as guidelines for
the Member States than as compulsory and enforceable regulations (Niklasson
2014). As the breadth and depth of the economic integration intensified over
the decades, the number of social areas affected by some kind of regulation
also increased. Nevertheless, they focused almost exclusively on employment,
and furthermore they took the form of non-binding guidelines.
Following the Paris Summit in 1972, where EC leaders acknowledged
the “imbalance between the economic health (growth) of the Community
and the quality of life of its citizens (social dimension)” (Dodo 2014), the
Community’s first Social Action Programme was launched. It followed
three main objectives: promoting/providing full employment, providing
an improvement in living and working conditions, and increasing workers’
participation in the industry.
Not much later, after the first enlargement of the EC in 1975, the European
Regional Development Fund was established. Its objective is to mitigate the
regional disparities within the community. The Single European Act in 1986
reaffirmed this, by emphasising the need for reducing disparities between
regions and increasing economic and social cohesion.
In 1989, the Charter of Fundamental Social Rights was presented by
the European Commission, and it was subsequently enshrined in the 1992
Maastricht Treaty as the Social Chapter of the Union. The areas which the
relevant regulations extended to were health and safety, gender equality,
collective bargaining and workers’ rights, social security and social exclusion
- these policies clearly bear the signature of the ideologically dominant
workfare approach.
Controversially, it was precisely the same Maastricht Treaty which gave rise
to the European Monetary Union and paved the way to the introduction of the
euro, one of the most important projects of the EU so far. As a consequence,
in Maastricht, the asymmetry between the economic and social dimensions
of integration was reinforced by elevating monetary policy entirely to the
European level, even as most of the fiscal policy prerogatives remain in the
hands of national governments, albeit with strict fiscal policy regulations
(De la Porte and Heins 2016).
By the 2010s, the Community had developed distinct policies in several
areas that can be regarded as social, such as education, public health, consumer
protection, culture, and employment. Among these, employment policy is the