The social legacy in EU budget law

The EU budget now stands at its recurring turning point: the next Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) for 2028–2034. This article examines a dimension of this budget considerably underexplored – its social legacy – and takes this legacy to interrogate the trajectory of budgetary integration, including the current MFF proposal, and its delicate balances of market, social, spatial and lately geopolitical concerns. The analysis centres on the European Social Fund, which seeks to improve working and living conditions since the 1957 EEC Treaty. I first trace the budget's social legacy to the early Community, before cohesion policy was formally operationalized in 1988. This perspective is a story of reversibility: the budget's development was not linear or inevitable, and past ambitions can contest present institutional projects. The article's second part analyses the social dimension of the Commission MFF proposal. In a turn to competitiveness, security, and budgetary ‘flexibility’, a risk of retreat from budgetary social policy unfolds across three dimensions: structure and availability of funding, articulation of social policy objectives, and how the budget embeds social policy within economic governance. Eroding this social legacy reshapes the political economy of EU budget law, which risks further detaching the Union from the lived experiences of those it governs.

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