Commission Entrepreneurship and the Debasing of Social Europe Before and After the Eurocrisis AMANDINE CRESPY 1 AND GEORG MENZ 2 1 Université Libre de Bruxelles. 2 Goldsmiths College University of London Abstract The bulk of the literature on ‘social Europe’ has suggested that social policy at the level of the EU remains to be characterized by the interplay of courts and markets. While we do not disagree with this argument, our objective is to shed light on the European Commission’s entrepreneurship, an element which appears to be somewhat bereft of scholarly attention. We show how, by displaying social acuity, defining problems and building teams, the Commission has actively promoted a policy agenda focused on liberal market building at the expense of socially minded regulation. This was however only made possible by a new constellation among the Member States after 2004. We substantiate this claim by documenting the activity of the Commission in two crucial policy domains of the post-Lisbon era: the liberalization of service provision, and the impact of the new macro-economic governance on social policy after the financial and debt crisis. Keywords: European Commission; Social policy; entrepreneurship; crisis; neoliberal; governance. Introduction: How Social Europe Fell Out of Fashion Recent debates on the contours of Social Europe seem somewhat more inconclusive about its prospects than were scholarly treatises in the 1990s. At the time, prescient scholarly treatises (Streeck and Schmitter, 1991; Leibfried and Pierson (eds), 1995; Scharpf, 1999; Geyer, 2000) correctly identified the limits to anything resembling a European-level welfare state, and questioned exaggerated hopes regarding the viability of Eurocorporatism (Falkner, 1998). More recently, while Caporaso and Tarrow (2009) posit the discovery of ‘Polanyi in Brussels’ in the shape of ECJ decisions strengthening the rights of individual EU citizens, other scholarly work that examines the nature of EU social and labour market policy is notably more pessimistic (Höpner and Schäfer, 2012). In particular, the argument has been put forward that the overall thrust of European integration, especially under the two Barroso Commission cabinets, has been largely deregulatory and (neo)liberal in nature, which suggests that the commitment to a re-regulatory ‘Social Europe’ of the Jacques Delors era (1985–94) has been all but abandoned. Social Europe is defined for our purposes as the pursuit of social (re-) regulation of economic and political processes with a view to taming the inequities arising from market processes. While the original six Member States all possessed Bismarckian-style welfare states and made up a largely homogeneous socioeco- nomic space, the disparity between levels of social spending, welfare arrangements, structural features of industrial relations and levels of income and wealth in the EU-28 today are such that there seems to be little common ground for communautarization. Notwithstanding the high quantity of social policy output, the overall impact of such regulation is largely market-enhancing. © 2015 The Author(s) JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies © 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA JCMS 2015 Volume 53. Number 4. pp. 753–768 DOI: 10.1111/jcms.12241