ABSTRACT
This research has analysed developments within the European social dimension between 2010 and 2018. Central to this analysis has been understanding the politics of what has been happening within the European social dimension in the context of the broader process of the political economy of European integration. First and foremost, European integration concerns itself with pursuing and defending the four founding freedoms of goods, capital, services and workers. Since the mid-1980s, the implementation and upholding of these four freedoms have been achieved by the EU and its Member States subscribing to neoliberalism. As Crespy and Menz (2015: 85) argue, ‘when reconnecting social policy to broader framework of political economy and the historical unfolding of European integration, what cannot be ignored is the many ways in which the embrace of neoliberalism has precluded the coming age of Social Europe’. Any analysis of the European social dimension needs to acknowledge the EU’s raison d’être and the significant role it has played, and continues to play, in underpinning developments in EU policies in the fields of employment, education and training, social policy, pensions, wages and healthcare.
