Misleading Analogies and Conceptual Ambiguities

As already mentioned, a small but influential body of elite opinion sees not only economic, but also political integration as steps towards the ultimate goal of a ‘Social Europe’ – just as the national market and the liberal state of the nineteenth century are thought to have prepared the ground for the modern welfare state. Only a strong social dimension, it is held, can legitimate the process of European integration, and at the same time rescue the national welfare state threatened by globalization. The addition of an enveloping social dimension to the integration process, the champions of Social Europe assert, would enjoy widespread popular support. After the rejection of the Constitutional Treaty, for example, Belgian prime minister Guy Verhofstadt claimed that the French and Dutch voters had opposed the treaty, not because it was too ambitious, but rather because it was not sufficiently ambitious: it did not go far enough in the direction of a supranational welfare state. Members of the intelligentsia such as Juergen Habermas explained the failure of the draft Constitution primarily as an indication of the opposition of the voters to the neo-liberal bias of the document, and an expression of popular demand for a more welfare-orientated Union (see chapter 3). Habermas wrote: ‘If something can be deduced with certainty from the [French and Dutch] vote, it is this: that not all western nations are willing to accept the social and cultural costs of welfare inequality, costs which the neo-liberals would like to impose on them in the name of accelerated economic growth’ (2005: 3).