Conclusion

This concluding chapter summarizes the book’s main findings, details the limitations of the research, and elaborates the implications of the argument for the social science of stratification, as well as for the political questions of where Europe goes from here. It begins with an analysis of the recent recession through the lens of unequal Europe. It then evaluates three counterfactual scenarios. The first is Global Europe: what if Europe globalized instead of regionalized? The second is Economic Europe: what if Europe integrated economically without integrating politically? The third is Social Europe: what if the technocratic capitalist turn had failed to dominate European-level policy and jurisprudence in the 1980s?

Breaking the Mold

This chapter describes how the resources generated by the integrated European economy have been distributed as social rights of citizenship. As the European economy has developed, have European welfare states expanded, stabilized, or retrenched? These trends and effects matter because they reveal the changing structure of political inequality in Europe, and because the European welfare state has a strong effect on the distribution of income across European households. The first part of the chapter addresses the question of whether the development of the integrated European economy contributed to expansion of the social rights of citizenship, which would be a sign of reduced political inequality within European nations. The second part addresses the subject of political inequality in Europe as an integrating whole more directly by engaging with the convergence debate: with respect to citizenship rights, does it now matter more or less which national political economy one inhabits?

Changing the Rules of the Game to Build the European Economy

This chapter describes the development of the European political economy since the 1957 Rome treaty. It uses econometric and historical case evidence to build the argument that European integration has advanced both from the top down and from the bottom up. The first part presents several measures of European integration to address the question of how we know integration when we see it. The second part describes two mechanisms of integration: redistribution from the top down via the European Social Fund, and integration from the bottom up through the formation of the Euro-Regions. The third part describes the development of a convergent European economy, where macroeconomic differences have been reduced through European integration, especially before the 1980s, and especially if economies are weighted by their populations.

European Integration and an Institutional Theory of Inequality

This chapter provides an overview of the book’s main themes. The book argues that European integration has reorganized class struggle to the European level, entrenching a technocratic capitalism that weakens welfare states and raises income inequality. It asks: How have the fruits of European labor been distributed? Who wins and who loses from European integration? How are citizenship rights and economic fortunes being distributed? The remainder of the chapter discusses trends in welfare-state development and income inequality; current approaches to the welfare state and income inequality; and the turn toward to technocratic capitalism that now characterizes the EU’s policy priorities.

The European Polarization of Income Distributions

The stratification of Europe combines two trends: the economic convergence among European economies and the within-nation polarization of the distribution of household income. This chapter examines the combination of these trends to describe the new structure of European stratification, and it analyzes what role European integration has played in these changes. Using fixed-effects models that simulate control for unmeasured but stable between-country differences in the drivers of income inequality over the 1973–2013 period, it extrapolates predictions from those models and compares these to data on income inequality from Waves V and VI of the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), circa 2000–2010, and Eurostat, circa 2008–2012. It then uses individual-level data from the LIS and Eurostat to calculate the level of total income inequality in Europe and the changing contribution of between- and within-nation income inequality to the total.