Genesis and Development of the European Pillar of Social Rights: Towards an Overhaul of the EU's Social Policies?

In September 2015, the European Commission President Jean Claude Juncker launched the European Pillar of Social Rights (EPSR), a new political initiative aimed at fostering an «upward convergence» of social rights, in the first place within the Eurozone. So far, most of the comments and analyses on the EPSR have focused on its limits and potentials, by discussing how it could positively contribute to re-balancing the asymmetries between the economic and social dimensions of the European integration process. By contrast, this paper adopts a different perspective and focuses on the constellations of actors, interests, and ideas that accompanied the emergence and the gradual consolidation of the European Pillar of Social Rights. The purpose of the paper is twofold. Firstly, it reconstructs the new "window of opportunity" that led to the launch of the EPSR. To this end, we analyse the emergence of the EPSR also in the light of initiatives carried out by the previous European Commission (Barroso), such as the Social Investment Package. The aim is to understand whether and why Junker's Social Pillar could represent a point of departure. Secondly, the paper aims to investigate the rationalities (functional, political and normative) behind this new European Commission's initiative. The paper moves from a historical institutionalist perspective and focuses on the strategic agency and adapting capacity to institutional and political conditions of the European Commission. Building on this theoretical basis, as well as on interviews with key-informants and the content analysis of Commission's documents, it shows how the idea of a Social Pillar has come up at the EU level. In so doing, it unveils the different logics that have informed the EPSR and that can affect its future development.