This symposium was based on contributions from the recently published special issue of the journal Comparative European Politics on the EU’s responses to the sovereign debt crisis and how this has affected welfare state reforms in the Member States most severely hit by the crisis.
The findings which were presented at this occasion demonstrated that the nature of European Union’s intervention into domestic welfare states has changed, with an enhanced focus on fiscal consolidation, increased surveillance and enforcement of EU measures. Overall, this represents a radical alteration of EU integration, whereby the EU is involved in domestic affairs to an unprecedented degree, particularly with regard to national budgets, of which welfare state spending is an important component. Since these changes are highly institutionalized, the speakers argued that it was necessary that the EU encourages social investment much more than it does presently, highlighting and the social dimension of the European governance. According to the speakers, there are 3 dimensions of EU integration: interference, surveillance, and enforcement capacity.
Ms Theodoropoulou explained that the bail-out adjustment allowed EU to be intrusive, while she shared her perspective on the Memoranda of Understanding on specific economic policy conditionality (MoUs), signed between bailed-out member states (MS) and the EU. Ms Calorine de la Porte, presented a typology of EU integration to capture how, to what extent and according to which policy aims EU involvement in MS has altered with respect to labour market and social policy. In that respect, she showed that new instruments – Six pack, Fiscal compact and Two-Pack- have been layered onto the existing institutional framework governing the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU).