16 - Conclusions: myth and reality of social Europe

Summary

Beyond the state of the art

Our study contributes to the existing literatureon European integration, policy implementation, public–private interaction in policy-making and policy analysis. While detailed arguments can be found in the above chapters, this chapter is where we highlight some of the most important findings.

1. The process of designing and implementing EU law is political. In fact, it isa prime example of multi-level politics in practice. This seemingly simple and unsurprising finding has a number of aspects.

• Since the founding of the European Economic Community in the late 1950s, and especially since the beginning of the 1990s, the stock of EU legislation in the area of social policy and labour law has acquired a considerable depth and breadth. Hence, this policy area is not entirely left to ‘courts and markets’, although these are important (Leibfried and Pierson 2000).

• EU labour law is not a sum of insignificant rules that fail to go beyond what already exists in the member states. First, qualified majority voting has allowed the adoption of Directives even in the face of explicit opposition from individual governments. Second, the negotiators in Brussels sometimes lack information on what a specific rule will change in their domestic system. And third, domestic governments in general seem to consider the EU level a ‘normal’ arena of policy-making that supplements the realm of domestic politics.