4. Perspectives on the Evolution of European Social Policy

perspectives on the evolutionof european social policy 31conform to the internal market; in this stage, positive integration of social policywas limited, not making up for losses nationally (Kvist and Saari 2007: 230). Sincethen, there has been a ‘third wave’ of integration which has involved the furtherrealization of the internal market, EMU, the fifth enlargement and the creation ofnew policy processes, not all of which are captured in the ‘imbalance thesis’.In particular, the implications of new policy processes and the fifth enlargementtend to be overlooked. The importance of new policy processes like the LisbonStrategy and the OMC, lies in the fact that they exemplify a new form of ‘positiveintegration’. Unlike old positive integration that leads to more policy making atthe EU level, this new form of positive integration mainly provides input to policymaking at the national level where decisions on social protection occur (Kvist andSaari 2007). This new kind of positive integration fits with the interactive perspectivearticulated by NESC in background paper on governance and policy-making. It isalso in keeping with emerging scholarship on the European Court of Justice whichmaintains that there is a degree of conditionality attached to the supremacy ofEU law and this is not a temporary aberration but a permanent feature of the EUconstitutional order. Accordingly, the relationship between national and EU legalorders should be construed as ‘interactive rather than hierarchical’ (Hunt and Shaw2009). If this is the case, then the ECJ does not impose solutions of a particularideological hue but invites national systems to moderate between rights, theimportance of which is agreed by all.Enlargement is another issue that tends to receive partial attention from theimbalance thesis. The fifth enlargement may have created incentives for employersand individual workers to have greater recourse to previously existing channels ofindirect wage competition need to be acknowledged. The scale of subcontractingby companies in the EU-15 of companies from the EU-10, the numbers of workersbeing ‘posted’, the scale and reach of agency workforces, the increasing numberof mobile self-employed and the extent to which some of them may – in effect– be working as employees, etc., are just some of the channels which need tobe monitored.These pressures and anxieties did, in turn, prompt policy and institutionaldevelopments in Ireland. Indeed, in Irish policy and partnership there was intensefocus on labour standards and consideration of how standards could be protectedin a fairly international labour market in the context of a voluntarist regime ofindustrial relations. In its analysis of migration policy, NESC argued that it is morefeasible and desirable to protect labour standards within the country, rather thanrely on controlling entry to the country. The undoubted challenge of protectinglabour standards was placed in the wider context of achieving integration ofmigrants and avoiding labour market, social and linguistic segmentation. Thisresulted from Ireland’s reflection on the difficulties faced by other EU memberstates that experienced immigration in the 1960s and 1970s (NESC, 2006). Theseperspectives highlighted the need not only for strengthened law and institutionsto protect labour standards, such as NERA, but also for the wide involvement of thesocial partners and NGOs in both labour standards and integration.