Working paper The nature and rationale for European social rights

EuSocialCit members Maarten Keune, Maurizio Ferrera, and Francesco Corti, together with former member and current Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Social Affairs and Public Health in the Belgian federal government, Frank Vandenbroucke, have published a working paper entitled The nature and rationale for European social rights.

This paper is the first in a series of working papers that is part of WP2 “Social Citizenship in Europe and the role of the EU: conceptual framework, state of play and scenarios for improvement”. As the EuSocialCit project starts from the presumption that EU integration has reached a stage whereby social rights, commonly agreed at the EU level, should become part and parcel of European citizenship, this WP conceptually address the questions of ‘why’, ‘what’, ‘who’, and ‘how’  that are triggered by this presumption. What is the nature of EU social citizenship and the social rights associated with it? And, what is the rationale for the EU to be involved in providing social rights?

In order to understand the state and nature of EU social citizenship and the role that the EU plays in this now and in the future, the EuSocialCit team believes that it is necessary to ‘dissect’ the constitutive elements of social rights at the various levels (local, national and EU) at which they are provided. To this end, this published working paper develops a resource-based and multi-level conception of social rights. With regard to the rationale, it offers an overview of the main approaches that prevail in the long-standing debate on the justification and feasibility of a stronger EU social citizenship and present a synthesis of these approaches that may help further the debate.

Download the working paper here: