Social exclusion: the new paradigm

Recent years have seen increasing awareness and concern about the growth of poverty and social exclusion within Europe as a whole. In Western Europe this rediscovery of poverty has been associated with the resurgence of high unemployment, while in the 1990s, the problems of the transition to a market economy are now raising similar concerns in Central and Eastern Europe. This growing concern has been evident in debates at the level of the European Community and anti-poverty programmes – sponsored by the European Commission (EC) – have included research studies, efforts at statistical harmonisation, and action project social exclusion was written into the Maastricht Treaty and into the objectives of the structural funds (Room, 1995). The Council of Europe has been commissioning studies of social exclusion as well, focused on the wider range of EC member states, and fuelled by its specific interest in human rights (Duffy, 1995). The term ‘social exclusion’ has replaced ‘poverty’ in EC law and policies since then.

These days, it is well accepted that poverty is not simply a matter of inadequate financial resources, and that combating poverty also requires access by individuals and families to decent living conditions and means of integration into the labour market (and society more generally). Accordingly, there is no single legal instrument or social programme which could be put forward as a means of preventing and combating social exclusion, but rather a wide range of such instruments and programmes.

Since the objective of the Treaty of Rome was to construct a European Economic Community, little importance was attached to a common social policy. However, a first step towards the development of explicit social policy was taken in the 1970s, by giving practical meaning to the guarantee of equal treatment for men and women in labour law and social security (laid down in Article 119 of the EEC Treaty). Since then, the EC Council of Ministers has passed five directives referring to this objective. Another important development in the mid-1970s was the recognition of the need to combat poverty as one of the EC's priorities, which evolved in response to debates concerning persistent poverty, which had emerged as a result of changes in family structure and rising unemployment (later termed ‘new poverty’) in member states.