"The European Union as a Global Social Policy Actor" (with M. Mayer) in A. Kaash and K. Martens (Eds.), "Actors and Agency in Global Social Policy", Oxford University Press 2015

The chapter intends to shed light on the social dimension of EU’s external action. From the mid-1990s until the beginning of the international crisis in 2008 (when the trend was largely – albeit not loudly – reversed), the EU steadily increased its engagement in addressing global social problems, and provided a progressively more articulated vision of how to respond to them. The chapter starts out by providing an overview of how the EU incorporated a variety of social elements into the image that it was trying to convey in the international arena, and discusses the relative importance of social policy concerns within foreign policy priorities. In order to assess the legitimacy of the EU as a global social policy actor, the second part of the chapter tests the EU’s impact on social policies at national levels. This is done against the backdrop of the EU’s engagement in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) process, with a special focus on Africa. By reviewing the country strategy papers which the EU agreed for the period 2008-2013 with Sub-Saharan countries, notably among the poorest and most deprived areas of the planet, the section points to a clear disconnect between EU’s official commitments concerning the MDGs and the policies implemented on the ground. The third part provides specific suggestions on how to re-align discourse and policy practice, to the mutual advantage of the EU and African LDCs. However, as pointed out in the concluding remarks, following the break-out of the international financial and economic crisis, the European political context appears increasingly unfavorable for an upgrading of the EU’s engagement in global social policy.