ABSTRACT
European intervention in the social sphere — and annexed questions such as why, to what extent and in what way — has long been a vexata quaestio. It has attracted the attention of a large community of lawyers, policy makers and scholars mainly because it presents the European Union with a difficult regulatory task, the reason for this being the coexistence of different national welfare regimes, differing not only in levels of economic development, but also in their normative and socio-philosophical aspirations and institutional structures (Scharpf 2002). The different understandings of the "social" also explain the uneasy — at times conflictual — relationship it has always had with the "economic", the uncertain place of social rights in the completion of the Single Market and, more generally, the lack of coherence at legislative and policy levels. Periods of "embedded liberalism" have been followed by years of social activism which in turn have been followed by phases of "re-embedded liberalism". 1 As Lord Wedderburn (1995: 391) suggestively puts it, 'the social can of course contribute to competitiveness, but when it conflicts with the economic, whatever the rhetoric, it has few friends'.
