New economic coordination has changed the landscape of EU governance (Amtenbrink, 2012). Its impact on the EU's social dimension is topic of political and scholarly debate. Some tend to argue that the EU has lost track of its social aspirations (e.g. Janssen, 2013; Watt, 2013; Clauwaert and Schömann,...

This article aims at establishing to what extent the renewed EU economic and social policy coordination cycles offer opportunities to uphold and further develop the Union’s social objectives. First, it seeks to examine to what extent the legal frameworks in which macroeconomic and social...

This paper analyzes how EU social objectives and policy coordination have been integrated into the Europe 2020 Strategy and the Union’s emerging post-crisis architecture of economic governance. Based on published and unpublished documents as well as interviews with high-level policy makers,...