ABSTRACT
The aim of this chapter is to examine the actions and achievements of social democratic party actors pursuing policy outcomes at the European level. The core claim of Chapter 4 was that ‘new’ social democratic party elites turned to ‘Social Europe’ in an attempt to continue to mobilize an electoral constituency historically constructed around the pursuit of labour decommodifying public policies, whilst nevertheless seeking largely to suppress such demands for decommodification at the national level. The argument developed was that the institutional obstacles to policy-making at the European level have a self-limiting effect which ensures that social democratic party elites are able to promote decommodifying measures at the supranational level without any significant risk of those policies being realized, thereby producing an absence of decommodifying measures that is explicable in terms of factors external to social democratic parties themselves. In order to examine this claim, the present chapter studies the development of a ‘Social Europe’ agenda amongst social democratic actors located at the EU-level. It begins with a consideration of the way in which supranational level opportunities have been perceived and portrayed by EU-level social democratic party actors, including a more detailed examination of the specific policy commitments agreed by those actors. The chapter then turns to consider the extent to which the self-limiting nature of EU institutional relations has (as claimed earlier) acted to preclude substantive decommodifying measures from being realized. The purpose of this chapter, therefore, is to examine the claim, developed in the earlier chapters, that ‘new’ social democratic party elites increasingly utilize the opportunities of EUlevel policy-making to seek to reproduce an electoral constituency historically constructed around the pursuit of decommodifying measures, whilst nevertheless encountering significant institutional obstacles that impede the realization of such an agenda (and thereby explain, and in part legitimate, the underdevelopment of ‘Social Europe’).
