D6.3 Report on an analysis of competing influences on the social construction of social rights across Europe and the implications for variations of access to such rights

The concept and the substance of social rights as rights of citizenship are of contested and relatively recent historical provenance. Prior to the emergence of modern welfare states, social provision across Europe was based largely in localised systems of discretionary poor relief shaped in part by religious influences. The rise of industrial capitalism gave rise to social concerns that found expression in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in a tenuous but essentially social liberal consensus favouring the development of a disparate array of social insurance arrangements for the protection of workers. The subsequent evolution of such arrangements was affected in a variety of ways by the consequences of two world wars and the rise and fall of communism. In the mid-twentieth century, at the time that the foundations of the EU were being laid, social rights emerged as implicit or explicit components of national citizenship in a variety of Western European welfare regimes, but also as aspirational principles established through an international human rights framework. Towards the end of the twentieth century, the combined effects of financial globalisation, the collapse of communism in Eastern and Central Europe and the hegemonic rise of neo-liberal economic and managerial orthodoxies have given rise in the twenty-first century to less certain understandings of social rights. Such evidence as we have indicates there is no unanimity among policy actors as to the meaning of social rights and that the discourse and understanding of social rights is as variable within European countries as it is between them. The development of social policy is not grounded in a shared understanding of social rights. The barrier to the defence and promotion of social citizenship in Europe lays not so much in inconsistencies in the de facto realisation of specific rights as in a failure explicitly to engage with and accommodate uncertainties and/or ideological differences as to the aim and purpose of such rights. If there is to be a broadly consensual and effective form of supra-national European social citizenship, this may require serious debate as to the basis for some kind of substantively shared social policy initiative (such as the introduction of a modest European Citizen’s income).