During the past 10 years, the Europeanisation of social protection has undergone a remarkable transformation. Europeanisation of social protection concerns the relationship between the national and EU levels in social protection. Originally, Jean Monnet and other architects of the European Communities (later the European Union, EU) bought into neofunctionalist theories of European integration. According to neofunctionalism, cooperation among European countries in economic areas and technical matters – called ‘negative integration’ – would gradually spill over into ‘positive integration’, with countries agreeing on the formulation of common policies at the EU level (see Haas, 1958). Thus defined, positive integration entails a transfer of sovereignty from the national to the supranational level, that of the EU.

Two waves of research have examined the relationship between the EU and social protection. First-wave scholars noted the weak foundation and mandate of EU institutions in social policy. Because the EU had no legal or monetary means of carrying out its own social policies, it resorted to regulatory social policy (Majone, 1993). Typical of many first-wave studies, a study on the impact of membership on British social policy found an impact in only two domains: gender equality and non-discrimination against EU nationals (Baldwin-Edwards and Gough, 1991). Scholars in this period generally shared the view that the EU had little impact on national social protection (for example, Lange, 1992) and that EU social policy was regulatory and symbolic (Majone, 1993).

Parallel with the first wave, the EU also sparked interest for two other groups of researchers. Evaluation researchers studied the poverty programmes that the EU ran from the 1970s to the early 1990s, and legal experts studied European Court of Justice (ECJ) case law, particularly on gender equality and coordination of social security. These legal experts created the empirical foundation for the secondwave scholars.

Inspired by neofunctionalist arguements, second-wave scholars made an analytical distinction between positive and negative integration. Their starting point was the observation that European integration in social policy was characterised less by positive integration (that is, initiatives of political actors for developing either EU social policies or common social policies across Member States) than by negative integration (that is, spillover from economic markets to social policy).