This provided, from the late 1950s to the beginning of the 1970s Community initiatives within the social policy area were almost exclusively geared toward free movement and the issue of intra-Community labor migration (Dinan 1999: 421; Williams 1994: 182). In large part, therefore, it was the implementation and development of social rights for internal labor migrants that came to define supranational social policy during the Community’s first decades.
This should not lead one to interpret the role of Community social policy solely in mechanistic terms, as if social policy only functioned as a crass handmaiden to economic imperatives calling for greater cross-national labor mobility. While this certainly was an important part of the story, the European Commission also aspired to provide Community social policy with a stronger and more wide-ranging mandate, one that would also encompass redistributory instruments and thus go beyond the confines of compensatory measures targeted at internal migrant workers and their families. In the 1960s, for instance, the Commission endeavored to set in train a gradual harmonization of national social policy, arguing for an elevation of social policy standards and living and working conditions across the Community. For this purpose the Commission established a close collaboration with national trade unions, a move that greatly incensed both governments and employers’ associations. This, not the least, since unions soon tried to make use of the platform afforded to them by the Commission for the purpose of reaping domestic social and political gains (Meehan 1993: 68–9). Toward the latter part of the 1960s, this undertaking on the part of unions led to charges from governments that “the Commission was using trade unions as pressure groups against them” in order to infringe upon the national control over social policy-making (Meehan 1993: 69). As a consequence, it was not long before governments resorted to reprisals against the Commission, deciding to greatly limit its power of initiative in social affairs as well as imposing restrictions on its collaboration with organized labor (Meehan 1993: 69–70).
If this modifies the mechanistic, or purely “economistic” interpretation, it also points to the presence of a conflict between the Commission and the member states with regard to the role and scope of supranational social and welfare policy (see Collins 1975: 32–3, 99). As we shall see ahead, this struggle and conflict over the aim and scope of Community social policy would resurface in conjunction with the economic downturn in the 1970s, as well as during both the Single Market reforms in the 1980s and the negotiations of the Maastricht Treaty in the early 1990s.
Failing to gain a hearing for its larger social policy objectives, much of the Commission’s efforts in this area during the 1960s and 70s would thus focus on obtaining substantial social rights for internal labor migrants and their families.3 This became apparent in the numerous initiatives, programs, and new supranational legislation emanating out of Brussels, all of which aimed to facilitate the migrants’ situation both at and outside their new workplaces. The migrants were not only to be treated in exactly the same way as domestic workers with regard to wages, working conditions, information rights, dismissal, and trade union rights; they were also to receive equal social welfare, equally favorable social insurances, and equal or even prioritized access to housing. The Commission also devoted much energy to ensure the right to family reunification for labor migrants, and that the families of labor migrants were given the same rights as nationals concerning working life and social benefits.
Even though the term “integration policy” (directed at migrants) had not been coined in the European context at the time, several of the Community social policy measures targeting internal labor migrants assumed the character of what subsequently in the 1980s and 90s would come to belong under that policy heading (Collins 1975: 101). According to the Commission’s recommendations and the supranational provisions that gradually were adopted, labor migrants and their families were thus to be offered the best possible practical preparations for their move to another member state. They were also to be provided with assistance to psychologically prepare for work and life in a new country, and encouraged to keep in touch with family and friends who did not join them. Another priority was to make sure that migrants were given sufficient information about their social rights in the new country. While language courses should be offered, migrants should also be assisted by personnel who spoke their language so as to guarantee that all information was properly conveyed. Such personnel were also to facilitate migrants’ acquaintance with the new country’s culture and traditions as well as put them into contact with social and cultural associations.
As is evident, Community policy took pains to prevent a situation where member-state citizens would be degraded to second-class citizens when they moved to and started work in a member state other than the one where they held national citizenship. If this would be the case, the reasoning went at the time, intra-Community labor migration would hardly stand a chance of gathering the type of momentum necessary to meet the demand. Most actors were also practically in agreement that the free movement of labor migrants should not be allowed to lead to (what is today termed) social dumping, whereby richer member states and their corporations would start to use migrants from poorer ones for the purpose of lowering salary and welfare levels for the domestic labor force (see Collins 1975; Flanagan 1993; Geddes 2000a: 213).
More than a “Manifesto for Capital”
Given the Rome Treaty’s strong emphasis on growth, economies and production bases of scale, internal free trade, free circulation for capital, and competitiveness, it is little wonder that many scholars have likened the Rome Treaty to a “manifesto for capital” (Williams 1994: 181). In many ways this is an appropriate simile (see further Carchedi 2001; Cocks 1980; Holland 1980; Mandel 1970; Moschonas 1996); or as the first European Commission President, Walter Hallstein (1972: 29), put it: “the basic law of the European Economic Community, its whole philosophy, is liberal. Its guiding principle is to establish undistorted competition in an undivided market.” But if we are to understand the concurrent and rather successful work that the Commission carried out to ensure intra-Community migrants and their families’ social rights (i.e. their social citizenship), the “manifesto for capital” simile needs to be qualified historically. During the first three postwar decades, capitalism and capital interests stood in a different relation to labor and welfare than they have done since the profound political-economic changes that began to transpire in the 1970s and 80s. For reasons of both a functional and political nature, this meant that capital accumulation and the power of corporate interests were embedded within and in many respects subordinated to the building of welfare states in Western Europe. To a large extent this was made possible by the “embedded liberal” postwar Bretton Woods system; an international political-economic regime, which bound states accountable to an international system of fixed exchange rates and capital controls (Ruggie 1982). European integration was in large parts both a result of and a response to this international regime’s way of functioning. Characteristic of embedded liberalism was that it admitted, and in some sense had its basis in, a relative compatibility between international economic liberalization (i.e. multilateralism) and the build-up of national welfare states (i.e. social stability)