Social protection in the European Union (EU) is primarily a national preserve. The EU has little competence in social protection: regulative powers are limited and resources scarce. The EU cannot stipulate specific social protection policies, for example, the harmonisation of Member States’ social protection systems, nor can it carry out its own social protection policies. Member States are left to decide what type and level of social protection they want and are able to afford. While 10 years ago this was a fairly accurate picture of social protection in the EU, since then developments at both national and EU levels have had direct and indirect effects on social protection in Europe. In particular these developments have led to national and EU levels becoming more interwoven, a process we describe as the Europeanisation of social protection.

In order to understand the ongoing Europeanisation of social protection, four sets of developments at EU level are of particular importance: new policy processes and areas taken up at the EU level; the increased application of internal market rules to the (new) area of social protection; the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU); and the recent enlargement of the EU (nearly doubling the number of Member States).

During the 1990s an increasing belief in the European Commission and among Member States was that social protection should be seen as a productive factor (see, for example, European Commission, 1993a; Ministerie van Sociale Zaken en Werkgelegenheid, 1997). This belief led first to the inclusion of employment objectives in the 1997 Amsterdam Treaty, with Member States’ cooperation based on the open method of coordination (OMC). In 2000 the Heads of State and Government agreed to put social objectives at the same level as economic objectives in the Lisbon Strategy, and extended the use of the OMC to the field of social protection. Before 2000 positive integration in the sense of creating common EU social protection policies was at a virtual halt because the Community method in social policy required unanimity among Member States before anything could be taken forward, and because the principle of subsidiarity and proportionality applied to social policy, that is, that the EU should intervene only if the Member States could not deal with the problem themselves. The new modes of governance were a jump-start to EU social policy.