Introduction

The most recent global financial and economic crisis has accelerated the European Union to a crossroads where it can either strengthen or fall apart. Amidst the contemporary capitalist constellation, achievements of several decades of economic and social integration are at stake. Hence, after a decade-long contentious EU Treaty reform, the newly enacted Lisbon Treaty has to prove itself under quite unfavourable conditions. Faced with failing markets and states, many suspect the EU under the new Lisbon rules of seeking to further empower ‘Market Europe’ while others are concerned it might unduly advance a burdensome supranational ‘European social polity’. As a matter of fact, European integration has been shaped by the ‘competitive fight for survival’ between these two paradigms of a legitimate social and economic order at least since the 1980s. While the economic liberalistic project has been striving for monetary unification and financial rigidity, the social solidarity venture has sought to promote a ‘Social Europe’ with redistributive ambitions, albeit ‘less in financial terms than in terms of equal standards and political co-ordination’. Moreover, in the complex multilayered EU, tensions between national and EU levels have grown over the years, ‘as economic decision-making has increasingly moved upwards towards the EU level while social politics and identity have largely remained national, along with the mechanisms of electoral sanctions’.