Sweden, the SAP and European integration

Abstract: European integration has increasingly come to depend on the abolition of national regulations, driven by the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ). According to previous research, this mode of integration effectively undermines the institutional foundations of social democratic welfare states and coordinated systems of industrial relations – something which has not been fully appreciated by social democratic parties in these countries. The purpose of the thesis is to explain the Swedish Social Democratic Party's (SAP) response to these challenges. Through the application of theories from the literature on Europeanization and welfare state retrenchment, two cases are analysed: the liberalization of healthcare, and the controversial interpretations of the Posted Workers Directive. In both cases the SAP identified the initial “misfit” caused by EU policies and mobilized to resist it. It was however only in the second case that the party came to the conclusion that changes to secondary law would not suffice and that Treaty change was necessary. This difference is explained by trade union mobilization, caused by threats to the institutional power bases of these actors. In Sweden, the social partners remain highly relevant also to the study of welfare state retrenchment, as they did in its expansionary phase.