EUSOCIALCIT and the Question Europe Keeps Avoiding

In Brief

The EUSOCIALCIT project, a four-year Horizon 2020 research initiative coordinated by CEPS, concluded in 2024 with a comprehensive analysis of European social citizenship. The project examined how the European Pillar of Social Rights (EPSR) could be translated into concrete policy measures across three domains: citizen empowerment, fair working conditions, and social inclusion. Its findings reveal a persistent gap between the EU's stated social ambitions and the institutional mechanisms available to deliver them. For policymakers and technologists working on AI governance, the project offers a crucial lesson: social rights frameworks that ignore implementation realities produce declarations, not outcomes.

The research behind this piece points to a deeper tension in European governance, one that deserves more than a policy brief. That conversation continues May 19 in Vienna at Human x AI Europe, where the people shaping Europe's future will be in the room.

The European Union has a habit of making solemn declarations about social rights and then struggling to explain why those rights remain unevenly distributed across member states. EUSOCIALCIT, a four-year research project funded under Horizon 2020, set out to understand this gap. The project, which concluded in 2024, asked a question that sounds simple but turns out to be structurally complex: what would it actually take to make European social citizenship meaningful?

The answer, as the project's final publications reveal, is not primarily about political will. It is about the mismatch between the level at which social rights are proclaimed and the levels at which resources to support those rights actually exist.

The Declaration-Implementation Gap

When the presidents of the European Commission, Parliament, and Council signed the interinstitutional proclamation on the European Pillar of Social Rights in November 2017, they committed to twenty principles covering everything from education and training to minimum income protection. The EPSR was designed, in the Commission's framing, as "a compass for the renewed convergence towards better working and living conditions in Europe."

Seven years later, convergence remains elusive. The EUSOCIALCIT research consortium, which combined expertise in political science, law, sociology, social policy, and economics, found that the problem is not the principles themselves. The problem is that social rights require resources, and those resources are distributed across EU, national, and local levels in ways that the EPSR framework does not adequately address.

This is not a facts disagreement. Everyone agrees that social outcomes vary dramatically across member states. It is not primarily a values disagreement either. Few European policymakers openly argue against fair working conditions or social inclusion. The disagreement is about incentives and institutional design: who bears the cost of implementing social rights, and what mechanisms exist to ensure that costs are actually borne?

Three Domains, Three Different Problems

The CEPS-coordinated project organized its analysis around the three building blocks of the EPSR: empowerment of citizens, fair working conditions, and social inclusion. Each domain reveals a different structural challenge.

Empowerment (education, training, lifelong learning) requires long-term investment in human capital. The returns are diffuse and delayed. National governments face electoral cycles that reward short-term spending. The EU can set targets and provide some funding, but it cannot compel member states to prioritize social investment over more visible expenditures.

Fair working conditions involve regulation of labor markets that remain primarily national. The EU has expanded its competence in this area through directives on working time, platform work, and minimum wages, but enforcement depends on national labor inspectorates with varying capacity and political support.

Social inclusion (minimum income protection, housing, access to services) is the most resource-intensive domain and the one where EU competence is weakest. The project's research on minimum income protection found that adequacy varies enormously across member states, and that EU-level coordination mechanisms have limited traction on national benefit levels.

The question worth asking: is this a design flaw or a feature? The EU was not constructed as a social union. Its foundational logic was market integration, with social policy remaining a national prerogative. The EPSR represents an attempt to graft social citizenship onto a structure built for economic citizenship. EUSOCIALCIT's contribution is to map precisely where that graft is taking and where it is being rejected.

What Citizens Actually Want

One of the project's more interesting findings concerns citizen attitudes. The research examined not just what social rights people believe they should have, but what they expect the EU specifically to deliver. The gap between these two is significant.

Citizens across member states express strong support for social rights in the abstract. But when asked about EU-level action, preferences diverge along predictable lines: citizens in countries with weaker national welfare states tend to favor more EU involvement, while those in countries with stronger systems are more skeptical of European-level harmonization.

This creates a political constraint that the EPSR's architects understood but could not resolve. Upward convergence sounds appealing until it implies that some member states must change their systems more than others. The project's analysis of citizen attitudes suggests that the demand for EU social action is real but conditional, and that the conditions vary systematically across the union.

Implications for AI Governance

For readers focused on AI policy, the EUSOCIALCIT findings carry an uncomfortable implication. The EU is currently attempting something structurally similar with digital and AI governance: proclaiming rights and principles at the European level while implementation capacity remains distributed across member states with varying resources and priorities.

The AI Act establishes requirements. National market surveillance authorities must enforce them. The gap between the regulation's ambitions and the enforcement capacity of smaller member states is already visible. The same pattern that EUSOCIALCIT documented in social policy, where EU-level declarations outpace implementation mechanisms, is likely to recur in AI governance.

This is not an argument against EU-level AI regulation. It is an argument for learning from the social policy experience. The EUSOCIALCIT project's emphasis on "resource-based, multi-level" analysis of rights offers a framework that AI governance scholars might usefully adopt. A right that exists on paper but lacks the institutional resources to be vindicated is not, in any meaningful sense, a right.

The Honest Question

The EUSOCIALCIT project concluded with policy recommendations for strengthening European social citizenship. These recommendations are sensible and well-grounded in the research. They are also, in the current political environment, unlikely to be implemented at scale.

This is not a criticism of the project. It is a recognition that research can diagnose problems more easily than it can solve them. The value of EUSOCIALCIT lies in its diagnostic precision: it names the specific mechanisms through which EU social ambitions are frustrated, and it provides empirical grounding for debates that often proceed on assertion alone.

For policymakers, the project offers a framework for asking better questions. Instead of "should the EU do more on social policy?" the question becomes: "at which level do the resources exist to support this specific right, and what institutional mechanisms would be required to mobilize those resources?"

For technologists and AI researchers, the parallel is direct. Instead of "should the EU regulate AI?" the question becomes: "what enforcement capacity exists at which level, and how do we design governance mechanisms that match ambition to implementation reality?"

The EUSOCIALCIT project does not answer these questions definitively. But it demonstrates what serious analysis of the gap between European aspirations and European institutions looks like. That analysis is more valuable than another declaration of principles.