Social rights in the European Union (1960- 2020): from market to social citizenship and back? 

SOCITEU is a 4-year interdisciplinary research project funded by ULB (Action de recherché concertée) and led by Amandine Crespy (CEVIPOL) and Nicolas Verschueren (MMC). IEE researchers Stephen Gaffney (MMC), Bastian Kenn (CEVIPOL), and Viola Shahini (CEVIPOL) are part of the project’s team.

SOCITEU investigates the role of EU integration in reshaping citizenship. This process has extended and transnationalised rights but it also been argued to debase national social rights and to feed stratified forms of citizenship across the continent. In fact, many actors no longer see the EU as an arena for reconstructing social citizenship in a transnational mode. Rather, the EU is seen as an entity which threatens social citizenship or that provides, at best, a thin and piecemeal market-based form of citizenship, coming nowhere near the ideal-typical Marshallian model. More recently, the proclamation of the European Pillar of Social Rights (EPSR) and the associated policy initiatives have been welcomed as a moment of revival and strengthening of EU social citizenship.

Against this backdrop, the objective of SOCITEU is to understand the evolving role of the EU – through its policies, prescriptions, and the reactions to them – in reshaping social citizenship. Importantly, our project is guided by the hypothesis that the history of the EU exhibits a non-linear movement. This is why we aim to bring ‘history back in’ and conduct research that draws on the methods of both political science and history.

The researchers involved in SOCITEU deal with three topics in particular:
  • the European marches of the unemployed against the background of socio-economic transformations of the 1990s
  • the EU agenda on training and skills in a historical perspective
  • the hopes and pitfalls in implementing the European Pillar Social Rights across Europe
In the framework of SOCITEU, we have invited researchers from all over Europe to the IEE to jointly reflect on these issues and bring their own insights. Next to publishing our work in specialized journals, we also aim to disseminate our findings to the wider public.