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Social Europe and its limits : hardening integration, softening constraints?

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1350-1763; 1466-4429
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Journal of European public policy, 2025, OnlineFirst
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SCHREURS, Sven, Social Europe and its limits : hardening integration, softening constraints?, Journal of European public policy, 2025, OnlineFirst - https://hdl.handle.net/1814/92731
Abstract
The theory of the structural asymmetry has profoundly influenced how scholars think about European integration. At a first glance, a widely-acclaimed ‘revival’ of EU social policy casts doubt on Scharpf’s predictions about the systematic undermining of social market economies, as I have argued elsewhere. But does this critique hold up, on closer inspection? Höpner and co-authors rightly point out that the literature on ‘social Europe’ has focused on the (supranational) agency behind recent policy changes, but often neglected the underlying structural conditions under which these have taken place. Institutional hurdles and socioeconomic diversity still constrain the opportunities for social integration. Nonetheless, I argue in this piece that the space for social and labour market policy-making at the EU level has expanded over the past two decades, resulting from a process of policy learning and the (re-)legitimation of the European polity.
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Published online: 26 May 2025
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