Social rights—securing Europe’s future

This week in Vilnius, at a conference on the European Social Charter, it felt like a paradigm shift was taking place.

It was as if the ghost of Karl Polanyi hung over political leaders and top government officials as they plotted the social future of Europe in Vilnius this week. Behind their backs, the Hungarian political economist would have understood their efforts to address the ‘polycrisis’ into which four decades of deregulated markets had plunged the continent—and their focus on socially re-embedding those markets to point the European ship towards calmer waters.

The High-Level Conference on the European Social Charter, held under the auspices of the Lithuanian presidency of the Committee of Ministers of the 46-member Council of Europe, was a product of the fourth summit of the organisation last May in Reykjavik. There the heads of state and government had declared: ‘Social justice is crucial for democratic stability and security’—before reaffirming their commitment to the charter system. The Vilnius Declaration agreed this week rehearsed that mantra in the first sentence.

The charter, the less-foregrounded counterpart of the European Convention on Human Rights, was agreed in more secure times in 1961 and revised in 1996 after the end of the cold war. The high-level conference, with its underlying consensus that democratic social policy must now rescue a rudderless market economy, suggested ‘social rights’ was an idea whose time had come. Aoife Nolan, president of the European Committee of Social Rights (ECSR), which monitors states’ performance, told journalists: ‘I think we have seen a real cultural shift on social rights.’

Contemporary challenges

In Hamlet, Shakespeare warned that sorrows do not arrive as ‘single spies’ but ‘in battalions’. And conference participants not only listed the elements of the polycrisis—renewed war in Europe, the cost-of-living crisis, the climate catastrophe—but also highlighted the contemporary challenges posed by a digitalised market economy lacking social steering, from the precarity of platform work to artificial intelligence and workplace surveillance.

They recognised that social rights—amid the indivisibility and interdependence of the wider gamut of human rights—provided them with the language to get their heads around how all of these huge problems could most successfully be addressed: more than one speaker used the adjective ‘civilisational’. In that context, the charter was referred to repeatedly not only as the reassuring anchor of Europe’s ‘social constitution’ but as ‘a living instrument’ for a fast-changing environment.

Miore than once, too, did participants call in aid a 1979 ruling by the European Court of Human Rights, in which the court stressed that enjoyment of rights could not just be ‘theoretical or illusory’ but had to be ‘practical and effective’. That of course implies the commitment of resources. But there too the language was in place: the talk was no longer of ‘social expenditure’ as a drain on market dynamism but, following Anton Hemerijck, of ‘social investment’ in prosperity, inclusion and the green transition.

Considerable appetite

Not all Council of Europe member states have ratified the revised charter (a few not even the original), making for a complicated duality. States can be selective beyond a core as to the rights to which they are bound. And most have not accepted the mechanism for collective complaints adjudicated by the ECSR. But some government representatives in Vilnius announced or envisaged some additional commitments under the charter system. And there was considerable appetite around the table for future such events, including hosting offers, in the spirit of sharing good practice and engaging in mutual learning.

More ‘political will’ was however needed, said Isabelle Schömann representing the European Trade Union Confederation. And, as ever, the non-governmental organisations were ahead of the states. The Council of Europe Conference of INGOs urged all member states to make up the shortfalls in their charter commitments and to bring the charter up to date in the face of ‘democratic backsliding’ and the rise of populism.

The ECSR recommended the charter be added to or amended to adress contemporary challenges, such as (the right to) a safe and healthy environment, atypical work and AI. But on this the Vilnius Declaration negotiated among the states parties only suggested ‘further discussions’. And it was silent on the recommendation from the committee that the personal scope of the charter should be widened (as with the European Convention on Human Rights) from citizens to denizens (thus protecting, for instance, undocumented migrant labourers).

NGOs are also banging on the door for more voice and dialogue. They want not only to be engaged by states on how they implement their commitments to social rights but also want states to accept—as only Finland so far has done—that they, as well as INGOs and employers and trade unions, can avail themselves of the collective-complaints mechanism.

And where does the European Union fit in all this? All its 27 members are of course members of the Council of Europe and the La Hulpe Declaration on the European Pillar of Social Rights, secured under the Belgian presidency of the Council of the EU earlier this year, recommended more co-operation between the two institutions. But the union has yet to accede to the charter itself and that does not appear to be on the horizon.

Recurrent theme

Absent from the conference room was of course any representative of the Russian Federation, shown the door by the Council of Europe in short order after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. And if there was one recurrent theme articulated by participants it was the continuing expression of solidarity with Ukraine and the link between peace and social justice.

On the day before the conference proper, the Ministry of Social Security and Labour of Lithuania hosted an event in conjunction with the Ukrainian Ministry of Social Policy and the Council of Europe on ‘protecting social rights in times of war’. ‘The Russian war of aggression is a war against human rights,’ said Michael O’Flaherty, the Council of Europe commissioner for human rights. The Lithuanian minister of social security and labour, Vytautas Silinskas, concurred. It was a war of social rights against an empire which recognised no human rights, he said. ‘So it is a war for Europe that Ukraine is fighting.’

Paradoxically, though, the government in Ukraine has been ambivalent about social rights itself, though engaging in a very positive project with the Council of Europe in this regard. ‘Ukraine’s European integration course forces us to constantly pay attention to the European Social Charter, to prioritise it in our goals,’ said its minister of social policy, Oksana Zholnovych, at the launch of the project last year. Yet she has also said : ‘We want our people to stop living with the feeling that someone owes them something.’

Labour rights too have meanwhile been undermined in Ukraine, with legislation in 2022 introducing zero-hours contracts and exempting small and medium enterprises from coverage by collective agreements with trade unions. Zholnovych declined to comment on this tension in Vilnius. But it goes back to the association of social rights—not only in Ukraine—with the Soviet dictatorship during the cold war, which partly explained their subordination to civil and political rights in western Europe over the decades.

These however are different times. Concluding the conference, the senior Council of Europe official Christos Giakomopoulos said the need was to translate participants’ commitment into ‘political resolve’. And he said: ‘Social rights must be part of any strategy to respond to the current crisis and to any future crisis.’

This concludes our series on the European Social Charter