Quantum Leap or Slow Decline? Shaping the Idea of a European Unemployment Insurance

The EU’s SURE programme was praised by EU officials, politicians, and researchers alike with some calling it a “quantum leap” for social Europe. But given this far-reaching excitement, why did it take 45 years to implement a policy that jointly deals with unemployment in the EU’s common market in a manner of a common insurance system? To understand this, I trace how the idea of a European unemployment insurance (EUI) has evolved since 1975 up until the adoption of SURE. I focus on the role of ideas and what conditions their success. The study is structured along four ideal-typical conceptualisations of how an EUI could be designed, namely as a genuine European scheme, a system of partial pooling of risk, an unemployment re-insurance, and a job re-insurance. My analysis pays close attention to the interplay between ideas, actors, and institutions. While constraints linked to the Treaties, economic concerns, and perceived national interests complicate social policy making at EU level, the reformulation of concrete ideas of such social policies can help overcome institutional and procedural hurdles. Decades-long critical debates amongst issue experts gradually moved concrete ideas of an EUI away from a focus on inter-personal solidarity and social protection towards a tool for achieving economic goals. This allowed advocates of the policy to address mostly economically framed fears of EU-wide redistribution and moral hazard. Furthermore, the EU’s dominant role in implementing the scheme was gradually replaced by proposals for national implementation, thus reducing resistance by member states such as Germany and resolving issues with the Treaties. When these ideational adjustments were paired with parties adopting the policy into their manifestos and with a political gridlock after the 2019 European Parliament elections, the idea of an EUI moved onto the European Commission’s policy agenda.