The Effects of Europeanisation on Welfare and Labour Reforms in Spain under Felipe González

Summary (no more than 500 words) The effects of Europeanisation - here defined as 'a process through which EU political, social and economic dynamics become an increasingly important part of the domestic political system' (Paolo Graziano) - on national welfare states remains a relatively understudied topic. Scholars focusing on this topic have recently shifted away from studying the direct effect of European integration on welfare arrangements to focus on how local actors mediate these impacts and use the resources and constraints provided by EU membership for their own strategic purposes. The welfare and labour reforms undertaken by Socialist president Felipe González (1982-1996) in Spain provide an excellent framework to study these dynamics. In the course of a presidency that had the accession of Spain to the EU as its main aim, González sought to build up Spanish welfare capacities to match the level of his European partners while also engaging in liberalising labour reforms that immediately put the welfare state under pressure. The second half of his presidency was marked by greater social concessions to please social partners, but these had to be immediately retrenched to address the 1992 economic crisis and to comply with the Treaty of Maastricht's fiscal criteria. I intend to use the process tracing methodology to explore the complex interactions behind these key reforms so as to assess the role played by European political, legal and cognitive resources in them, and thus the extent to which they were influenced by Europeanisation.

This project would seek to contribute to two important yet underdeveloped strands of welfare state literature: Europeanisation and Southern welfare states. Early Europeanisation literature focused on the direct effects of European integration on national welfare states, while more recent works have nuanced these dynamics by exploring how the mediation of national actors produced different reform outcomes in different member states. However, the main weakness of these works is that they assume that national actors are always "using" Europe for reforms that would be necessary in any case, thus ignoring earlier literature on the "real" impact of Europe. In contrast, my project will seek to explore the role of actors in mediating Europeanisation without any prior assumptions that this was merely being "used" for their own purposes, objectively distinguishing between when Europeanisation was used discursively and when it proved a real constraint.

There has also been a growing literature on Southern welfare states, a welfare family only defined in the late 1990s. Within this welfare type, the Spanish welfare state remains very understudied, and there is a literature gap when it comes to Europeanisation and the Spanish welfare state under Felipe González. As scholars and EU institutions increasingly advocate for a social investment approach to guarantee both competitiveness and protection in member states, understanding how the transposition of European ideas to the national arena has taken place in the past is crucial to elucidate what future reform paths might be contingent on. As one of the welfare types most maladjusted to the social investment paradigm, understanding the Spanish case is particularly important.