ABSTRACT

Introduction The main social challenges faced by European societies are said to be similar to those that confront all industrial societies, at least at the macro-level: the new labour order, the ageing of populations, the trend towards migration and multiethnicity, new social risks, regional differentiation and the demands on people of the knowledge-based economy (Maydell et al. 2006: 50). In such a context, regional associations can find an appropriate role in helping to bring nations together to confront these social challenges. This is the case of the European Union (EU), which is increasingly projecting itself both as the forum where discussion of common problems should take place and as the venue where solutions will be found – through the reform of the European Social Model (Lisbon Council 2008) and through streamlining and consolidating social policies into the heart of integration policy (Maydell et al. 2006: 285-95). For its part, the second major European regional body, the Council of Europe, has been credited for its role in opening up discussion of social and human rights issues to the countries of Eastern Europe (Huber 1999). Its aims include social goals such as ‘to find common solutions to the challenges facing European society: such as discrimination against minorities, xenophobia, intolerance, bioethics and cloning, terrorism, trafficking in human beings, organized crime and corruption, cyber crime, violence against children’ (Council of Europe 2008a). In other words, both organizations see themselves as part of the solution. With the repeated adherence of new member states – the total is currently twenty-seven – and the continuing queue for membership from Eastern and Southern European states, the European Union is the most advanced of the world’s regional socio-economic and political integration projects. And with its ever-evolving Treaties – most recently the 2007 Treaty of Lisbon – and the repeated extension of powers accorded to its central supra-national body, the European Commission, it is also the world’s most developed case of nationstates pooling their sovereignty. Of the many facets of this integration project –

its single market, Central Bank and single currency, common foreign policy and extensive development aid, to name the main ones – the social dimension is one of the least well known. This is partly because in 1957, at the time of the founding of the European Economic Community through the Treaty of Rome, Western European states were already welfare states with well-developed public health and education services and a commitment to expenditure on social benefits reaching 15-20 per cent of their respective gross domestic products (GDP), much of it channelled through regional and local administrations. The notion of creating a single, pan-European welfare system with harmonized levels of expenditure was therefore daunting to policy-makers, given the idiosyncrasies of the member states’ social protection systems. For this and other reasons, the social provisions in the original Treaty of Rome were few, and their development tardy. While scholars favourable to welfare integration tended to stress this lack of integration, sceptics merely ignored it, leading to a common consensus that social policy integration was severely restrained by national governments on the grounds that they were eager to retain control over welfare provision and social expenditure budgets in their ongoing bids to gain and retain the support of their electorates. Needless to say, this powerful rationale leads to lowered expectations of any kind of sharing of sovereignty in the social field, which in turn promotes the belief that social integration must by its very nature lag in comparison to other fields: it must display scarce delegation of decisions and standards to the supra-national level, and little removal of barriers between countries. In the mid-1990s this view began to change with the work of Leibfried and Pierson (1995) and Hantrais (1995), who had perceived just how much European-level social policy had developed in the interim. The following decade saw liberal circles in the EU engaged in much hand-wringing about the supposedly outmoded state of Europe’s social model and the need to restructure rather than expand it, followed by a spate of counter-arguments attesting to its good health, proposals on how it could be preserved with reforms, claims that it was being energetically defended by social forces, and affirmations that it was in any case essential to Europe’s future (see Bieler and Morton 2001, Sakellaropoulos and Bergman 2004, Adnett and Hardy 2005, Jepsen and Serrano Pascual 2006, Giddens et al. 2006, Maydell v. et al. 2006, Bieler 2006). On the other hand, the less well-known Council of Europe, founded in 1949 in London, presently with forty-seven member states stretching from Portugal to Turkey and Russia to Iceland, is sometimes seen as having more advanced social rights, mainly on two grounds: first, because of its historic achievement of a European Convention on Human Rights in 1950 (even though this does not cover social rights at all), and second on account of its European Social Charter of 1961, which gained considerable international recognition. By contrast, the European Union did not adopt a social charter until 1989, and then only as a declaration of principles, which the UK refused to sign anyway. Therefore the Council of Europe’s earlier European Social Charter remained memorable, a symbol of advanced democracies’ social progress, their protective state and inclusive social values. Third, the Council of Europe’s ability to receive many Eastern European states as members at an early

stage of their post-communist democratization processes showed that countries with different socio-political traditions could share the values of the older democracies. This gave the European Social Charter the patina of authority in a panEuropean context. By contrast, the European Union only relaunched the project of agreeing a common social charter in 1999, ten years after its first attempt, and again only managed to get it approved as a non-binding commitment (something of a contradiction in terms) at the Nice Summit of Heads of European States and Governments in 2000. Named the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, it was finally incorporated into the draft Constitution for Europe, only for that to run aground on the rocks of the French and Dutch referenda of 2005. This occurred even though it was not the Charter the voters mainly objected to – on the contrary, for the French, the social provisions of the draft Constitution were considered too weak. The Constitution for Europe, amended and redrafted as the Reform Treaty, was relaunched in 2007 under a German presidency of the EU. At the end of the year, the Charter of Fundamental Rights became an intrinsic part of the new version of the EU’s grounding legal text, now called the Treaty of Lisbon, signed on 13 December 2007. Though it was proclaimed as binding, Britain and Poland managed to secure an ambiguous opt-out from it. Its ratification by each member state was scheduled to continue at least until the 2009 elections to the European Parliament. Even now, the justiciability or enforceability of this charter – the power of the text to have effect as a legal rule – is in some doubt, at least in terms of the ability of citizens to use it before a court of law to force their member state to grant them a right spelled out in an article of the text. For instance, could the right to have access to vocational and continuing training (Art. 15) actually force states to design and run such courses? Doubts arise from the ambivalent meanings of Article 51 ‘Scope’ in Chapter VII on General Provisions (European Communities 2000). Yet it would be a mistake to pass judgement on the European Union’s social policy domain simply on the basis of a comparison between its social charters and ones of the Council of Europe, since the former represents only a small part of the European Union’s social dimension, while the latter is the only social policy domain the Council of Europe has – given over as it is to the promotion of democracy and the protection of wider human rights. Furthermore, it is key to bear in mind that the EU is a supranational project of advancing legally binding integration between states, while the Council of Europe can only be described as a ‘significant presence in European integration’ (Macmullen 2004), as it remains fundamentally intergovernmental, as will be seen in this chapter’s examination of its weak enforcement of social norms. The aim of this chapter is to argue, first, that the social dimension of European integration is a highly complex array of policies, which is in many fields more advanced than is often supposed, due precisely to the complexity that makes it hard to grasp in its entirety. Second, the chapter argues that the European Union is also a more effective body for implementing cross-national social policies than the Council of Europe. Therefore, the second section of this chapter is devoted to assessing the European Union’s multifaceted social dimension; this

is followed in the third section by a thematic discussion on the EU’s regional social redistribution apparatus; its social regulation; EU-wide procedures that give citizens a voice to challenge rights abuse; and dialogue and cooperation between social groups around regional institutions. In the fourth section the Council of Europe’s work is addressed separately, in order to avoid comparing like with unlike until the last part of the section where the case of gender equality policy in both institutions is compared, ending with an exploration of the advantages and drawbacks of the policy options of exhortation versus regulation. This soft versus hard law crossroad reflects the crucial difference between the Council of Europe and the European Union as regional bodies that seek integration, convergence and common ground in different measure; and it represents a key dilemma for regional associations generally.