Accelerator or Brake? The EU and the Difficult Politics of Social Investment

Reorienting the welfare state towards social investment constitutes a complex and multidimensional challenge of policy recalibration and raises daunting political problems. The chapter analyses the strategy pursued by the EU, with a view to assessing its degree of ‘conduciveness’ to social investment recalibration at the domestic level. It is argued that the EU has indeed stimulated policy change, but that its potential as a social investment facilitator has been hamstrung by a number of weaknesses and shortcomings, especially on the discursive front. A more convinced and articulated endorsement of the social investment paradigm and a more focused attention to ‘capacity’ at the subnational and grass-root level should be the fronts to prioritize.