Second time lucky? The revival of ‘social Europe’ in the 1990s and the present compared

EU scholars have paid growing attention to a ‘social turn’ in the shadow of the Eurozone crisis. Advances in social legislation have been intertwined with a ‘socialization’ of economic governance, while the post-COVID-19 period has seen innovation in EU funding instruments to support national welfare states. Yet this is not the first time that a ‘revival of social Europe’ has been observed. During the 1990s, a broader and deepened role of the EU in the social domain was an issue of high political interest. This era saw the adoption of new labour directives through EU social dialogue, the introduction of a European Employment Strategy and the creation of the OMC for social inclusion, later extended to pensions and healthcare. This flurry of activity led Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker to declare, at the 1997 Social Summit, that ‘we have re-launched the building of Social Europe.’ At the time, these developments did not go unnoticed by scholars, giving rise to a rich literature on the limits and opportunities of EU social policy. But while the parallels between past and current events have occasionally been recognized, the theoretical implications of a full-fledged comparison have not been drawn out. This paper provides a systematic juxtaposition, teasing out commonalities and differences between the 1990s and the post-crisis social turn. Through the lens of actor-centred institutionalism, it seeks to uncover what enabled – and constrained – the positive coordination of decision-makers around a shared social agenda. Drawing on policy documentation, secondary literature and interviews, it traces how the constellation of actors, their orientations and the mode(s) of interaction between them shaped the form and substance of EU social initiatives. The paper concludes by reflecting what the ‘untimely end’ of social Europe in the mid-2000s might entail for the present proliferation of social policy activity.