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ABSTRACT
Drawing from the fields of Cultural Political Economy and Critical Policy Studies, this article examines the relationship between social policy and neoliberalism, focusing on the ‘social investment’ discourse promoted by the European Commission. In the social policy literature, social investment is widely considered a policy framework able to overcome neoliberalism, with the latter defined rather narrowly as welfare retrenchment. Instead, referring to the vast literature on neoliberalism, this article proposes an innovative two-dimensional conceptualisation of neoliberalism as a political and epistemological project. The analysis reveals that while social investment provides a much more generous reform path than welfare retrenchment, it nevertheless largely follows neoliberalism in its epistemological and distributive dimensions, extending the economic rationale to non-economic areas and accommodating the interests of the economic and financial elites. The article finally connects this result with broader debates within international political economy on the future of the welfare state in a global economy.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Jean-Michel Bonvin, Barbara Lucas, Lavinia Bifulco, Matteo Gianni, Frédéric Varone and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and helpful suggestions on earlier drafts of this paper.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 While the academic discourse on social investment generally puts a greater emphasis on social justice, rights and redistribution with respect to the approach promoted by the European Commission, it still tends to assign the highest priority to employment promotion and to embrace the language of ‘human capital’ and the de-politicised economic rationality for framing welfare reform.
2 However, social investment may imply the retrenchment of a certain kind of policies (e.g. those not centred on the promotion of human capital).
3 The unresponsiveness of the state vis-à-vis domestic demands and its subordination to the interest of global capital are crucial differences with respect to the ‘traditional’ welfare state. Indeed, also during the post-war social-democratic compromise the Keynesian welfare state had important economic functions – and part of the legitimacy of social policy reposed precisely on its positive economic roles. However, the Keynesian era was characterised not only by the presence of the welfare state but also by the regulation of the economy in the public interest (Cerny Citation1997, p. 258) – and this second dimension is largely absent in the social investment agenda, which assumes that global capitalism escapes democratic control and the only available option is to adapt social policy to the imperatives of internationally mobile capital.
4 Social investment is only one approach among others in the EU. Analysing a different set of policy documents, Miró (Citation2021) finds that the EU mainly promotes cost-competitiveness rather than quality-competitiveness, i.e. austerity rather than social investment. On the other hand, the recent adoption of the European Pillar of Social Rights may mark a break with neoliberalism and a potential reinforcement of rights-based ‘Social Europe’ (Corti and Vesan Citation2020).
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Francesco Laruffa
Francesco Laruffa (PhD) is Research Fellow at the University of Geneva. His research focuses on neoliberalism, welfare reform and social justice. His work appears in Journals such as Policy & Politics; Critical Social Policy; Journal of Human Development and Capabilities; Ethics and Social Welfare; Critical Sociology; Community, Work and Family; and International Review of Sociology.