Explaining the underdevelopment of `Social Europe’: a critical realization

This article argues that existing accounts of the underdevelopment of `Social Europe' have failed to adequately integrate the contending obstacles that explain the absence they rightly identify. It argues that by employing a critical realist methodology, including the concepts of generation, emergence, and stratification, it is possible to more adequately integrate knowledge of the obstacles to `Social Europe'. Concretely, the article argues that obstacles to `Social Europe' exist at three strata, constituted by institutional relations, political relations, and Europe-wide social relations, respectively. The underdevelopment of `Social Europe' emerged from the institutional stratum, which in turn was generated (but not determined) by the underlying political relations, which were themselves in turn generated by EU-wide social relations. From this perspective, the oft-lamented absence of `Social Europe' is an emergent property of underlying institutional, political and EU-wide social relations; its occurrence, therefore, is far less contingent than existing, less integrated, accounts suggest.