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NEW INSTITUTIONS, OLD IDEAS: THE PASSING MOMENT OF THE EUROPEAN SOCIAL MODEL Ingo Schmidt
The 1990s are widely seen as a decade of neoliberal globalization. Only European social democracy seemed to stem the tide of unfettered world markets, which neoliberal and conservative governments had unleashed in every other part of the world. Backed by a rising tide of electoral support, in 1998 social democrats were in government in 13 out of the then 15 member states of the European Union (EU). Together, they busily constructed a European social model (ESM) and presented it as an alternative to AngloSaxon capitalism. After the 1992 European Council (EC) meeting in Maastricht, the Social Dialogue, originally started in 1986, was upgraded to a process of consultation between employer associations, union representatives, and the European Commission. A complementary Macroeconomic Dialogue was instituted in 1999. In 2001, the EU announced its Lisbon Strategy, according to which the EU would become the fastest growing and most competitive region of the world. Now, the ESM was expected not only to produce social cohesion, but also to stimulate growth in knowledge-based economies. Towards these goals, annual Tripartite Social Summits for Growth and Employment were initiated since 2003. Neither the expectations regarding economic growth nor regarding social cohesion were met, however. EU growth hardly caught up to US levels in the years following 2000 and was lower than it had been in the 1990s in both regions. Moreover, after 10 Eastern European countries joined the EU in 2004, the process of European integration came to a crashing halt when plans for a European constitution were defeated by Dutch and French referenda in 2005. When a slightly revised and renamed version of this document Studies in Political Economy 84
AUTUMN 2009
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