How much 'negative integration'?

The period between the early 1980s and the mid 1990s is marked by a distinctive shift towards the institutional liberalization, deregulation, privatization, and welfare retrenchment, advanced politically by pretty cohesive centre-right governments. Of course, the launch of the Single Market Programme in 1986 is fully consistent with the general drive towards institutional liberalization. That said, the epoch between the launch of the Single Market and the Maastricht Treaty has not been one of unreconstructed neoliberalism.

Many policy initiatives listed above nuance the claim of the supremacy of market-making over market-correcting social policy concerns, the ECJ bias towards 'negative integration', and political immobilism at the level of EU intergovernmental decisionmaking. On closer inspection, there are important social dimensions to the Single Market. The Maastricht Treaty (Arts. 137 and 141) made short shrift of economic discrimination between men and women, which remained officially permitted in countries such as the Netherlands and Germany, and thus corrected for the competitive disadvantage of countries such as France, which as early as 1936 introduced the principle of equal pay for men and women (Ostner and Lewis, 1995). Gender policy has surely become one of the most impressive endeavours of EU social policy development, expanded with directives on parental leave (1995), part-time work (1997), and fixed-term (1999 (O'Connor, 2005). Then there is the proliferation of European health and safety legislation, working conditions, and equality in the workplace, brought under QMV by Article 118A of the Single European Act (Falkner, 2010a). Equal treatment and opportunity directives, and ECJ case law deriving from them, have extended a binding set of worker rights across Member States, including flexibility of working time and social security rights for mobile workers (Shaw, 2000; Burca, 2005). In addition, the social partnership provisions of the Maastricht Social Protocol and Agreement brought about Community-level collective agreements that went on to acquire the status of framework directives with minimum standards (Art. 138 of the Treaty). Significant achievements in the construction of 'Social Europe' in the wake of the Single Market should not blind us to important shortfalls (Falkner etal., 2005). In comparison to the industrial rights of workers, linked to employment status and free movement, EU social citizenship rights this remained underdeveloped.