The Missing Link: International Law, Administrative Power, and European Social Rights

Abstract

Social security for migrant workers was the first truly integrated European policy. The form that this "coordination" has taken since 1958 has proved remarkably stable right up to the present day. Migrant (nowadays "mobile") workers within the territory of the European Union (EU) have benefited from "deterritorialized" and "denationalized" rights in a profound break with the national and territorial logic of social states. This article shows that the implementation of this policy was the work of a small group of national civil servants. These officials imported elements from treaties and agreements negotiated in other international organizations since 1945 into the architecture of the EU. Constituted as an "administrative commission," their group acquired a transnational administrative power. They thus created one of the first international redistribution mechanisms, a sort of social state beyond borders. The article is based on the national archives of several of the founding member states of the EU (here I am drawing in particular on the French national and diplomatic archives), as well as the archives of the International Labour Organisation, the EU, and the British National Archive. The article uses scientific articles written by the civil servants it deals with and by their contemporaries as well.