THE CONVERGENT MOTIONS OF THE SOCIAL DIMENSION AND THE CULTURAL DIMENSION. NATIONAL AND EUROPEAN BLUEPRINTS

Abstract

Globalisation, Europeanisation and the issues related to postmodernism have faced the Western European welfare states with a series of difficulties and challenges, but the social policy systems adapted to these challenges in various manners and confronted them. The socio-cultural diversity on the one hand, and the attempt to unify the national systems, on the other, are matters which have raised and continue to raise questions at the European level, both in what concerns the social and the cultural dimensions. Why are there social policies in the EU? How have the objectives of these policies developped and changed and how are they convergent with the cultural endeavors? What are the motions of the national, European and global prospects? Starting form the path-dependency theory, we were trying to identify those distinctive marks which are challenges in the attempt to unify the systems from the New Member States with those from Western Europe. Later on these distinctive marks became cultural indicators. Concerning the New Institutionalism Theory and Neoclassical Sociology, the attempt was to analyze to what extent is the institutional framework organised by the cultural beliefs or by the common norms of the majority. Moreover, we shall attempt to discover the role played by the state in these exchanges of influence and how the European and global contexts affect the decision making process and that of national policy creation.