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66 ] Zsófia Kollányi Lastly, we must respond to the rise in inegualities by boosting our social policies. That is why we proclaimed the European Pillar of Social Rights. The Pillars principles range from wages to social protection systems, from minimum income to gender equality, from childcare to old-age income, and from health care to access to housing. (European Parliament 2017) Others, however, expressed strong doubts, and such reservations were aired from different sides of the political aisle: conservative and liberal politicians alike disagree with the method, insisting that the real solution would be not to tinker with social policy but to increase the flexibility of labour markets, increase competitiveness, and cut taxes. They believe that such measures would put Europe back on track. Others, mostly on the left of the political spectrum, believe that the EPSR in its proposed form will be a mere fig leaf, and they either refer to the Pillars as merely symbolic instruments (Borner 2019) or claim that as the EPSR is not more than “the summary of the EU’s current acquis social, no major improvements can be expected” (Seikel 2021). Another stream of strong opposition to the EPSR specifically, as well as to the general idea that the current social problems of the Union should and could be solved through social policy measures, stems from those who stress that the deterioration in social cohesion is primarily the result of austerity measures and forced fiscal restrictions for the sake of monetary stability, which were enacted during the hardest years of the crisis (Seikel 2021). Consequently, this view holds, it is the rules of the European Monetary Union as well as of EU-level macroeconomic policy that need to be reconsidered. Some analysts argue that “the main imbalances between economic and social priorities at the EU level risk remaining basically untouched by the Social Pillar as such” (Vesan and Corti 2019). Leaving aside for the time being whether these are adequate steps towards a more content Union with more popular support, or not, the insistence on national sovereignty regarding redistributive policies is basically blocking any real active social policy measure at the community level (Notermans 2019). This issue is often raised by a variety of actors, as it was the case also in the European Parliament during the debate on inequalities in 2017 (European Parliament 2017). Social policy is without a doubt one of the policy areas that - apart from the abovementioned dimensions mostly related to employment and the transferability of social rights - have remained to the largest extent within the regulatory competence of Member States. When trying to define the European Social Model, some argue that even today this is no more than the sum of national social systems rather than a jointly developed entity (Seikel 2021). Even in the mid-2010s, theoreticians pointed out how vaguely defined the European Social Model was - which might even be a deliberately used technique to avoid a direct conflict between conservative (typically against) and social democratic (typically for) forces, as the prevailing model allows all
