From Social Investment to Social Rights: The Juncker Commission as a Normative Entrepreneur

On 17 November 2017, the Council of the European Union, the Parliament and the Commission officially signed the inter-institutional Proclamation on the European Pillar of Social Rights. The EPSR was launched by President Juncker in September 2015, as a new political initiative aimed at fostering a new «upward convergence» of social rights, in the first place within the Euro-zone. To this end, the Commission presented the Social Pillar as a reference framework composed of twenty principles and rights which have been grouped into three main areas: equal opportunities and access to the labor market, fair working conditions, and social protection and inclusion. Since the beginning, the Juncker Commission has been strongly engaged in the promotion of high political momentum at the supranational level and debates in different Member States; the main goal being the attempt to deal with legitimacy crisis of the European integration process by focusing on the reinforcement of its social dimension. In this paper, our aim is to explore the way in which the Commission, and President Juncker in particular, in light of the opportunity of stronger leadership offered by the Spitzencandidaten system, can be claimed to have acted as a normative entrepreneur by providing a discursive shift in the dealing of the European social crisis. Our work will proceed through the analysis (through a combination of qualitative and software-based quantitative content analysis) of all speeches delivered by Commissioners in the discussion of the various components of the pillar. Our interest lies in understanding the way in which the Juncker Commission makes sense - as well as reintroduce to the European political vocabulary - the notion of social rights, in a perspective able to highlight its novelty dimension in the comparison to the retreat to the neoliberal/austerity language that permeated the Barroso Commission.