4 - The European Union and Human Rights

Summary

This chapter discusses how the European Union (EU) has developed a range of human rights-based policies, measures and instruments, and surveys this influence on social and welfare policies in member states. It starts by outlining the ideological tensions and practical difficulties in post-war Western Europe which influenced the establishment of what was to become the EU during the Cold War period. It then looks at how an increasingly centralising political and economic union began to adopt and promote concepts of human rights in principle and policy, culminating in the 2000 Charter of Fundamental Rights (the Social Charter). The discussion considers the tension between notions of ‘pooled sovereignty’ and the impact this has had on concepts of national sovereignty, workers’ rights and equality. It also explores the implications that EU oversight and enforcement of socio-economic policy may have for the development – or otherwise – of rights and social development at member state level. In doing this it considers how an economic union of some of the richest countries in the world, which is primarily focused on protecting economic growth for its own member states, can adhere to its stated commitments to universal human rights. It assesses the impact of an exclusive ‘Fortress Europe’, which maintains the market and wealth of the member states and their citizens, but paradoxically denies rights to vulnerable migrants. Finally, the chapter looks at the challenges facing EU human rights commitments as a result of rapidly shifting geo-political circumstances – refugees fleeing ongoing conflicts, COVID-19 mitigation, neoliberal globalisation, wealth inequality and global insecurity (Craig and de Búrca, 2015: 380– 428; Buonanno and Nugent, 2013: 246– 250).

The context

Today's European Union developed from a series of common economic agreements among six Western European states, beginning with the Treaty of Paris creating the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) on 18 April 1951. In the 1950s Europe was still recovering from war and was engulfed in a Cold War between the West's marketbased model of economic development and the command economies of the Soviet Union.