The return of the commission social entrepreneurship before and after the Covid-19 pandemic

Although a great number of scholars have attested the “slow-burning” crisis of Social Europe between the mid-2000s and the beginning of the 2010s,recent developments in EU social policies show important novelties, especially thanks to the adoption of the European Pillar of Social Rights (EPSR). Our argument is that the EPSR witnesses a renewed activism of the European Commission-led “supranationalism”, which unfolds through the revival of the “Community Method” in a political environment marked by an increased domestic politicisation of the European integration process. In so doing, the EPSR acted as both a “polity-maintenance” and “policy-trigger” strategy by deepening the EU integration in social policy domain after a decade of substantial polity inertia. The article also discusses the explicit and implicit legacy of the impact of EPSR on Social Europe by looking at the new initiatives and strategies carried out by the von der Leyen Commission.