ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the way in which Europe's political and economic elite have addressed the issue of welfare provision and welfare reform through the institutions of the European Union. The neoliberal turn of European integration and its negative effects on welfare in turn resulted in an erosion of the legitimacy of both the EU and — to a lesser extent — national governments. Transnational capital and the European institutions it has promoted have increasingly come to be identified as causes of the dismantling of welfare states. The discontent of the European population with regard to neoliberal integration became clear in a series of 'no' votes in referendums on the question of European integration, thereby articulating a deep and apparently irresolvable legitimacy crisis of the EU institutions. The UK anti-austerity movement therefore witnessed a series of protest events that sought to contest the imposition of austerity upon British society.
