The Bed You Made: Social Democracy and Industrial Policy in the EU

Abstract

Many observers seem puzzled by the demise of social democracy in the context of the EU. While some frame the developments in the context of the electoral woes of the centre-left at Member State level (Pauly 2018), others see a paradox: while social democratic policies and parties are highly in favour of the European project, the European project damages their electoral chances the most (Holmes and Lightfoot 2014: 228). This apparent paradox can be resolved quite easily, however, when adopting a critical political economy perspective and investigating the dissonance between social democratic commitments and the actual policies pursued at EU level. From a critical perspective, the current struggles of social democracy in national electoral arenas seem to be mainly an aftershock of the failure of Third Way politics-a politics that has

The emergence of a New European Labour Policy regime: Continuity and change since the euro crisis

“…One example is the pillar of social rights, which so far only had a non-binding, symbolic character and concentrates mainly on individual rights. Wigger and Horn (2019: 186–187) also stress the competitive orientation of the social rights postulated therein. Accordingly, the initiatives should be viewed as critically as the NELP as a whole.…”

“…This speaks to the vast influence of the export-oriented member states, especially Germany, as well as large transnational companies (Baccaro and Tober, 2021: 17–18; Heinrich, 2015: 8–9; I/ERT; I/BusinessEurope). Even if the main driving forces for the implementation of the NELP can only be briefly named here, studies show that European labour policy in its current form corresponds to the main interests of large transnational companies and promotes export-oriented accumulation regimes in the EU (Bieling and Buhr, 2015; van Apeldoorn, 2013; Wigger and Horn, 2019). Heinrich (2014: 180) therefore speaks of a ‘renewed pan-European strategy of global competitiveness’ among the European power bloc, which, led by European export capital and its business associations such as the European Round Table of Industrialists (2010) or BusinessEurope (2009), was able to anchor a policy of export promotion deeply in European euro crisis management (Konecny, 2012; Wigger, 2019).…”