Social protection is central to the fabric of European societies and the impact of the crisis on it is also essential. To understand the fate of the European social model that Mario Draghi declared dead in 2012, one needs a resolutely interdisciplinary approach. An economic approach is first and obviously necessary: Steffen Lehndorff will show that, in the current institutional arrangement lies a fundamental difficulty or contradiction between the course of politics at the EU level and the leeway left to national governments. His approach is reinforced by Arnaud Lechevalier’s who contends that, into the crisis, the two main paradigms that inform policies and politics at the EU level – namely ordoliberalism and social investment – concur in strengthening market mechanisms at the expense of the social dimension. A legal approach is no less essential because one feature of European integration has been that economic law has increasingly trumped national social law. This is what Diane Roman argues, when analyzing EU and ECHR case-law, emphasizing the weakness of the protection currently provided  by European Courts in the social field. Aristea Koukiadaki, for her part, shows how difficult the path has been for Portugal and Greece in adapting their national industrial relations systems, but, on the other hand, that litigation strategies are open. Finally, combining a linguistic and sociology approach allows us to understand that “linguistic political cultures” have had an increasing influence on the attitudes of citizens and voters, as the close examination of the Netherlands and Hungary teaches us.