Shaping the Social Model of the Post-Brexit Europe: Perspectives and Ongoing Actions

Abstract

The European social dimension has acquired, at least on the theoretical political plane of the last four years, a certain self-sufficiency that seems to move it away from that immediate scenario to the implosion of the Eurozone crisis where the declarations and proposals for the project’s viability circumscribed, without ambiguity, to the survival of European economic governance. However, this renaissance of social integration in the official discourse has not been the result of a stochastic variable, but of a double conjunction of factors: initially, a nod to the repeated demands of the United Kingdom to limit social aid to economically inactive European citizenship, with the aim of neutralizing, then, a hypothetical triumph of Brexit. At a later stage, to alleviate the Union’s deficits during crisis management, the social effects of which in the Member States have been correlated with the dangerous exponential increase in national parliaments of Europhobic political forces. A tactical, pragmatic and programmatic approaches present in the European Commission’s work programmes of 2016, 2017 and 2018, in which positive integration continues to be anchored in proposals where the social is viable in the ends, but not in the means.

Received: 17 December 2018
Accepted: 24 January 2019
Published online: 30 April 2019