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The social partners and EU treaty-making : revisiting Maastricht through the archives

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1831-4066
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EUI; LAW; AEL; Working Paper; 2025/01; ShaPE
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KILPATRICK, Claire, STEIERT, Marc, CELLINI, Jacopo, The social partners and EU treaty-making : revisiting Maastricht through the archives, EUI, LAW, AEL, Working Paper, 2025/01, ShaPE - https://hdl.handle.net/1814/78294
Abstract
This working paper sheds new light on the social partners in EU Treaty-making, particularly on today’s Title X TFEU on social policy, their interactions with EU institutions and the Member States in this process, and on EU treaty-making itself as a focus of scholarly inquiry. The Treaty-making process that led to the Maastricht Treaty is famously identified as a moment where three social partners organizations – ETUC, UNICE, and CEEP - drafted and agreed a social policy agreement (‘SPA’) annexed to the Treaty, later integrated in it. This SPA established a European social dialogue procedure by which social partners could ‘take over’ the EU law-making process on social policy and adopt a collective agreement, then capable of being generally extended by EU law. Our research proposes an adjusted reading of this important episode of Treaty-making by the social partners. The social partners’ role for Maastricht is indeed an atypical example of Treaty-making in that they had an unusual, EU institutionally supported, position to make proposals for Treaty change and their agreement was recorded as part of the official IGC documents. In a first perspective, this working paper provides an archive-based, in-depth account of their negotiations with the Commission and the Member States on a Treaty-based social dialogue procedure. In a second perspective, the social partners’ unusual role invites to reflect about the little knowledge we have of EU Treaty-making as a scholarly subject of enquiry. The working paper makes the case for the analysis of Treaty-making as a promising field and research agenda for legal-historical enquiry into the meaning and context of EU law and integration. An understanding of Treaty-making, for example, allows us to understand the origins and in particular the many uncertainties underpinning primary law in their elongated context, sometimes stretching across multiple Treaty revisions. It stresses the productiveness of disaggregating states, institutions and organisations into people with projects thereby highlighting the often-elusive nature of finding a clear will of the Member States inherent to EU law. It clarifies the concepts and context that allowed agreement on a Treaty text at a given point in time, and underscores the paths not taken in EU integration. These are only some ways in which research on EU Treaty-making is susceptible to enrich our understanding of EU law and integration.
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The ShaPE project (ShaPE – The Social Partners as shapers and makers of Social Europe: discovering foundations and futures) is funded by the European Union.