Marshall revisited: EU social policy from a social-rights perspective

The common legal and economic framework of the European Union (EU) has turned the vast socio-economic differences within Europe into virulent problems of social inequality – issues that it attempts to tackle within its limited resources. The article takes the EU’s self-expressed social commitment as a starting point and analyses its approaches to social policy from a social-rights perspective. It first discusses why Marshall’s social-citizenship concept provides a useful analytical tool to assess the social policies enacted so far at the European level and then presents an institutional analysis of the EU’s four major social-policy activities: harmonising, funding, coordination and cooperation. This analysis focuses on the horizontal and vertical relationships and the addressees of these policies to determine how these policies measure up against social-rights standards. The findings point to the poor development of transnational social citizenship given the special nature of EU social policies. The only social rights that exist at the European level are in the field of social-security coordination. And even those are marked by a double selectivity that excludes citizens who are not transnationally active and those who are but lack the necessary means to provide for themselves.