Resilience of Solidaristic Discourses in the Face of Crisis: The Concept of Politics of Inaction and the Evolution of Social Europe

Great research efforts have been invested in understanding the decision-making processes introduced with the post-crisis policy reforms. While some scholars identify the emergence of an outright German hegemony, others are more cautious and claim the emergence of a new method that combines elements of both the Community and the inter-governmental methods. This paper agrees that we need to take seriously the politics of the specific legal choices made in the aftermath of the crisis. However we should be careful not to have the debate exclusively cantered on the form of the new ‘post-crisis method’, but we need to focus at its consequences. To that end the paper explores the continuity and discontinuity of ‘social Europe’ discourse’. It analyses the resilience of the ‘social Europe’ in the aftermath of the Eurozone crisis through the concept of Politics of Inaction, which can shed light on the shallowness of the social cohesion discourse in the EU