ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on expansion of civil rights in the context of European market integration. It explains the changing nature of political rights in the European multi-level system and to the change in social rights in the context of an emerging society of individuals, to arrive at a discussion of European cosmopolitanism in the zone of tension between a cosmopolitan outlook and national solidarities. The European Single Market is first of all a driving force of the expansion of civil rights beyond national boundaries. Ever since the signing of the Treaty of Rome in 1957, market opening and the removal of barriers to market access and of discrimination have been established as guidelines to the European integration project. Europeanisation of social rights does not simply mean the reconstruction of the national welfare state at the European level, but involves a fundamental change to the meaning of social rights in the context of an emerging society of individuals.
