A (Modest) Proposal for Expanding Social Citizenship in the European Union

Abstract

Compared to the resounding (if rather vacuous) commitment in the Treaty of Maastricht to political citizenship, the European Union (EU) has made only fitful and erratic progress in defining its social citizenship. No one should be surprised that there is so little “Social Europe” (Schmitter 1997). If anything, the absence of any substantial commitment by the members of the EU to harmonize, or even to coordinate their social policies is over-determined. So many objective features of what the Euro-polity is not -at least, not yet -combine with several subjective aspects of the conjuncture in which Europeans are presently living that it is highly unlikely that much progress will be made in this domain for the foreseeable future. First, the member-states are at different levels of economic development. Their factors of production operate at systematically different levels of efficiency and relative scarcity and, hence, command different levels of income and return on investment. Variations in the social charges, tax regimes and formalities surrounding these different points of departure are important elements in determining the competitiveness of those striving to “catch up.” Second, the member-states have acquired over the past +100 years quite diverse “packets” of social policies and (especially) ways of financing them. Moreover, their mass publics seem relatively firmly (if begrudgingly) committed to their respective national status quos – at least in the sense that they collectively resist reductions in the benefits to which they have become

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