The Road to Social Europe: A Contemporary Approach to Political Cultures and Diversity in Europe, by Jean‐Claude Barbier. Routledge, London, 2014, 222 pp., ISBN: 978 1 13 802014 6, £24.99, paperback.
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/bjir.12089 |
| Published date | 01 September 2014 |
| Author | Michael Gold |
| Date | 01 September 2014 |
The Road to Social Europe: A Contemporary Approach to Political Cultures and
Diversity in Europe, by Jean-Claude Barbier. Routledge, London, 2014, 222 pp.,
ISBN: 978 1 13 802014 6, £24.99, paperback.
The European elections held in May 2014 revealed an unprecedented polarization of
attitudes towards the EU across the member-states. While a majority of the
electorate did continue to support the European project, a significant and vociferous
minority — blaming the EU for economic austerity, loss of national sovereignty and
mass migration — switched from mainstream to a range of extremist political
parties. So, given this polarization, the publication of Barbier’s book is timely as it
poses the fundamental question that we all urgently need to reconsider: what exactly
has hindered the ‘ever closer union’ to which the EU has historically aspired? If the
barriers really are so insurmountable, then maybe the EU does need to lower its
sights, in his words, to ‘a system of economic agreements and border police’ (p. 156).
But if we believe the barriers may gradually be broken down, then — however long
it takes — there opens up ‘the possibility of gradually reviving social innovations at
the EU level’ (p. 156).
For Europhiles and Europhobes, and for reformists in between, the nature of these
barriers remains a critical issue. Barbier focuses on just one aspect of this road to
social Europe in an attempt to supply an answer, perhaps the most intractable of all:
why have systems of social protection or welfare across the EU remained so diverse,
with so few signs of convergence? While social protection across the EU remains
under national control, the sharing of resources will be restricted, thereby impeding
the growth of solidarity and genuine European citizenship.
Barbier sets himself a Herculean task. Apart from Article 51 of the original Treaty
of Rome — which guarantees the social security of migrant workers across the
member-states — the EU from the outset has considered systems of social protection
as a matter exclusively for its member-states: they are so deeply rooted in national
histories, legal frameworks and cultures that their harmonization could never realis-
tically have been on the agenda. Indeed, Barbier’s general overview of ‘fifty years of
social Europe’ concludes that its ‘overall logic’ has been based on the principles of
market deregulation and negative integration (i.e. the dismantling of barriers to
trade), rather than positive integration (e.g. the creation of new EU-level frameworks
of social justice).
Growing recognition of the problems associated with regulating social policy
through ‘hard’ law led the EU in the late 1990s to develop the ‘open method
of co-ordination’ (OMC) as a means to achieve common aims in areas such as
employment, pensions and poverty through ‘soft’ law, such as benchmarking,
exchanging good practice and peer review. But even here, Barbier’s evaluation is
bleak. OMC reports were ‘seldom more than self-congratulatory exercises’, and the
Commission eventually admitted that ‘measuring the outcomes was technically
impossible’ (p. 52). The slowing pace of EU social policy, therefore, predates the
accession of new member-states, whose social protection systems were frequently
‘dysfunctional’ (p. 59), and the appointment of a new, overtly neoliberal Commis-
sion in 2004.
So far, so familiar. Barbier’s originality lies in his diagnosis of the challenges that
underpin ‘ever closer union’. He argues that cultural diversity is the ‘blind spot’ of
sociological research. Approaches that focus on institutionalist economics or ‘variet-
ies of capitalism’ he considers too reductive, not least because national political
discourses remain diverse even within typologies — they remain shot through with
bs_bs_banner
Book Reviews 609
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd/London School of Economics.
To continue reading
Request your trial