Europeanisation, National Identities and Migration ... - europeanization

70 Richard Münch
abandons legislation and regulatory interventions and, instead, prefers cohesion
by allowing for deviations depending on the interest situation of a member state. It
prefers unity by subsidiarity in the sense of allowing for private law, individually
negotiated agreements instead of public law regulations. It also favours governing
through conviction, recommendation, expertise and explication, governing through
consultation, governing through the supply of a range of regulations from which
member states are free to choose (for example, in the case of European company
committees), as well as governing through the diffusion of regulations on a multinational
political market. Moreover, national social policy is restricted increasingly:
it has to adjust to the requirements of the cross-border mobility of the workforce,
adapt to the interdependence of the action of relevant actors (e.g. entrepreneurs)
outside their territory and accept competition with other nations for mobile factors
of production.
What, according to Streeck, is the only thing that remains as a strategy for the
safeguarding of positive integration as a counterpart to negative market integration,
are the national modernisation coalitions between the state, the employers and
the trade unions (alliances for work), which aim at a re-regulation under the new
conditions and a simultaneous modernisation of the location through technical
rationalisation and qualification for work. There is no doubt that capital dominates
in such coalitions. The successful realisation of this recommendation, in contrast,
will face a problem, namely the fact that it has to unite three main actors under one
roof who exist less and less as closed corporate actors. Instead, all three sides of
this national alliance for renewal fragment into parts each having their particular
interests. The model is based on a pattern of the welfare state striving for equal
security for a vast majority of uniformly marked employees. However, this world of
the social-democratic ‘standard’ employee has ceased to exist. It has been replaced
by a considerably more varied structure of most different milieus. In this way,
even Streeck’s analysis which was made explicitly with the intention of leading
to a rejection of the model of the national welfare states, ends up in a dilemma. It
still intends to take something of the former welfare state over into the new world,
although the structural preconditions for such a renewal of the national welfare
state gradually vanish.
Creative destruction: constructing new forms
of social integration
The change in national social policy initiated by European integration is by no
means merely a process of lowering social standards. It is also a process which
overcomes long-established practices with exclusionary effects. Let us take employment
policies as an example. We certainly cannot say that the European welfare
states were successful here over the past 20 years. Most of them have rather been
unable to reduce the high unemployment rates thus far. It is only the Netherlands,
Denmark and the UK that have been able to record first successes in the late
1990s. The high level of job security costs in the European welfare states resulted
in a general reluctance of employers to offer new jobs. Instead of creating new jobs,