ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an overview of Social Europe and its institutional potentialities. The recent campaign of the European Commission, "Citizens First", aims to promote European citizenship and transnational mobility in the search of employment or improvement of qualifications. The program has established a linkage to what has been commonly called "Social Europe", the pendant to Competitiveness in the Single European Market. Instead of neocorporatism, which seems to preclude a more rigid system of interest intermediation, European integration is leading to a lighter, more open-ended and less strict version of it called the "social dialogue". For this it is the integration of a wider number of interest groups and actors in social dialogue committees at supranational, national, and subnational levels that may assure the success of Social Europe. Social Europe is already a reality in all member-states of the European Union, in spite of the diversity of its institutionalization and its more or less strong linkage to subnational and supranational structures.
