Competitive Europeanisation, Transnational Production and a Multiscalar Perspective on Social Policy in Europe.

The article discusses social policy with regard to the multiscalar competitive architecture of Europeanisation. The basic thesis is that the foundational logic of contemporary Europeanisation must be understood as a logic of economic integration via multiscalar socio-political fragmentation. For such an analysis, a critical political economy of Europeanisation is necessary, more precisely a labour-oriented European political economy of scale. I argue that existing regime-competition debates need to be broadened in two ways: First, social and economic geography, especially the concepts of scale, rescaling and glocalisation should be included. Such an expansion enables grasping that socio-political fragmentation not only encompasses national welfare systems, but cuts through them as well. Second, labour and production processes have to be brought back into the frame of competitive Europeanisation, to bring the extent of the Europeanisation social crisis into view.

Keywords: Europeanisation; glocalisation; labour process; scale; fragmentation; coercive competition; transnationalisation

One of the basic insights of critical European political economy and critical European studies in general is to analyse Europeanisation as socio-political regime competition ([89]; [2]; [93]; [9]; [79]; [53]). In this opening section, I first want to give a brief outline of this fundamental understanding of the mode of European integration, before arguing in the next section that this approach has to be extended analytically. Two things are necessary: The first is the integration of geographical concepts, particularly scale, rescaling and glocalisation, to overcome the nation-state–Europeanisation juxtaposition that became typical for critical approaches ([14]). The second, related need is to reintegrate labour and production processes into the frame of Europeanisation as competitive integration. The two enlargements reveal the explosive power of the basic logic of Europeanisation, i.e. economic integration via socio-spatial fragmentation. This basic logic encompasses nation-states but also cuts through them. Moreover, with social policy in Europe re-approaching the capital-labour relation, working conditions and the fragmented constitution of labour processes come into the focus as an inherent part of the long-lasting legitimacy and social crisis of Europeanisation ([78]; [48]).

To start with Europeanisation as socio-political regime competition: Historically, social democrats and socialists early on supported European economic integration but with supranational socio-political regulation and harmonisation of social systems as the condition ([57]). Despite the enormous upswing this idea experienced under fascism, it became marginalised in the epoch of postwar Keynesian economic integration with its focus on the harmonisation of economic and production standards for a common European market and the harmonisation of social standards rather as an appendix to this process ([89]). With the end of post-war growth and the crisis of Keynesianism, however, a fundamental change of this former, Keynesian integration project took place ([93]; [100]). On the surface, this change is rather technocratic because it developed in a series of ECJ rulings with the decisive shift that goods and services were no longer to be standardised in their nature, i.e. traded as unified on a unified market. Rather, mutual recognition was established, i.e. the principle that commodities produced according to the regulations of one member state must also be able to be sold in all other countries participating in the European single market (despite some exceptions, which are continuously being contested). Since then mutual recognition is seen as a breakthrough strategy against attempts by European member states to use nationally different product standards to continue protectionist policies.

Crucial for social policy is: This groundbreaking principle of thinking the internal market as consisting of different (not harmonised) production standards also applies to labour and social regulations. "What is true for goods, is also true for services and for people", the European Commission (1985: 17) succinctly states in its famous White Paper on the Completion of the Internal Market. Indeed, what is rightly expressed here is that production processes are labour processes, i.e. basically constituted under specific working and living conditions of working people. With the renewed market integration project 1992 and the subsequent European treaties, social and labour policy is excluded from supranational regulation and bound to national responsibility. Social policy, therefore, today consists of measures that enhance citizens' freedom of movement, to spending policies situated mostly at the national level and to the formulation of some rather low minimum standards (most notably in the sphere of working-time).

From a critical political economy perspective, the turn of the European integration mode towards 'neoliberal-negative integration' is highly problematic ([3]: 63ff.; [53]: 100f.; [79]). Under conditions of Europeanised ('harmonised') conduct for capital, monetary and market-liberalisation policy, different (national) socio-political and bargaining systems do become competitive (supply) factors for transnational investment-seeking capital. With the milestone of European Monetary Union, social and labour market policies become the means to 'adjust' competitive monetary and speculative pressures. As a result, different welfare and collective bargaining systems, labour laws policies on taxes, infrastructure or administration henceforth take on a position of regime competition with each other ([89]; Höpner/Schäfer 2008; [25]).

Regime competition, however, is an inherent political-economic process (and not an abstract effect of 'the market'). Rather, states are put (and actively put themselves) in a particularised, competitive relation to each other. The new Europeanisation project reflects and fosters national transformations from Keynesian Welfare States into competition states ([42]; [21]), in particular with the transformation from 'welfare' into 'workfare' and the commodification of social systems. Poland, to mention a first example, was the first country to introduce funded pension systems (at the request of the European Commission); another example is the German socio-political transformation towards the so-called Hartz IV system, which is repeatedly seen as a benchmark for the implementation of corresponding reforms in other countries such as France.

Competitive state formation and regime completion are also political in the sense that with a series of deregulating judgements by the European Court and the establishment of a new economic governance during crisis 2008ff. the European institutions directly intervene into the social and bargaining systems in order to foster socio-political deregulation ([54]; [17]; [26]). On the one hand, the socio-political parallels of these deregulating measurements are obvious, on the other hand they are asynchronous and country-specific in their character.

What we see here, in other words, is that regulation and deregulation in their socio-spatial unevenness is crucial. In the logic of welfare as supply it is the institutionalised difference between the socio-political regulations that will henceforth serve as a (potential) competitive advantage for integration via investment (Agnew 2001). Different European welfare systems will continue to offer 'goods', such as social justice or social protection, as this competition of the systems of social regulations is expected to stimulate trade, investment and growth ([20]; see also [81]). The competitive integration project, in other words, takes institutional and socio-political unevenness for its foundation.5 Or as Neil Brenner (2004: 475) puts it: socio-spatial unevenness is redefined "as a basis for economic growth". Economic integration rests upon socio-spatial fragmentation.

At this point of the analysis it is necessary to recall that the competitive European integration project was, at its beginning, a successful hegemonic project. Bastiaan [95] describes in detail how the idea to have national responsibility for social cohesion in a European environment of competitiveness was widely welcomed and supported by most sections of the social-democratic forces in a broad sense, including trade unions (see for this and the following also Bieling/Schulten 2001). Indeed, van Apeldoorn argues, a 'continental', or embedded neoliberalism developed, different from the Anglo-Saxon capitalist heartland, because the neoliberal forces had to adjust to persisting traditions of corporatist industrial relations and social partnership, existing elements of social protection and still relatively strong organised labour. In fact, the principle of mutual recognition, i.e. socio-political non-Europeanisation, was widely interpreted by trade unions as being for their protection. Additionally and not without irony, the renewed, competitive integration project was completed under the social democratic EU Commission presidency of Jacques Delors ([27]–1995). In this period, the European Social Model experienced an enormous symbolic enhancement with a range of basically soft law, non-binding European instruments, such as the Directive on European Works Councils, the European Social Dialogue, or the Social Charter. As institutions, trade unions since then have been strongly involved in the corresponding consultations, programmatic statements or research and documentation processes. Bieling and Schulten (2001: 8) note that former sceptical, even hostile trade union positions to further European integration widely changed towards the new motto of "critical support". In this vein, the ETUC and most of the big established national trade unions also welcomed and supported strategic orientations and policies such as the employment initiative and the Lisbon strategy as they would balance and integrate economic, social and environmental policies (Bieling/Schulten 2001).

Meanwhile, however, integration and incorporation are in obvious crisis. On the one hand, the ETUC and most of the national trade union organisations do continue to principally support and are involved in the subsequent big political strategies (such as Europe 2020), and in particular the series of soft law social initiatives such as the social investment package of 2013, the Youth Guarantee or the European Pillar of Social Rights campaign ([96]). On the other hand, there is the widely documented rising unevenness and social and socio-political disintegration in Europe ([60]; [4]; [75]), with visible authoritarian neoliberal governance ([15]) and a moral and legitimation crisis manifested among others in the rise of nationalist and far-right populist assemblies.

Behind the background of this European crisis, current debates in the political-economic regime-competition perspective have to be expanded. Typically marked by post-Keynesianism, institutionalism and Regulation Theory, debates focus on macroeconomic imbalances, the inter-national economic divide among the member states, misleading convergence criteria, European monetary policy, and generally the new authoritarian European governance ([68]; [43]; [90]; [88]; [55]; [39]; [58]; [44]; [67]; [7]; [51]). All these issues are important, but there is a problematically strong conceptual focus on the national regulations in relation to the European institutions, based on the broad consensus that the EU would violate national socio-political sovereignty principles. Europeanisation seems to consist of national and supranational state apparatuses, and the European socio-political crisis seems to be primarily a crisis of strong national sovereignty, including the pleas for national exits from the common market and currency ([79]; [45]).

Two related shortfalls are important here with regard to competitive Europeanisation. The first is that a nation-state-centric approach takes no or only little notice of uneven intra-national development. Intra-national socio-political cleavages and fissures risk being underestimated or falling outside of the sphere of theoretical reflection. Social and economic geography has been addressing this problem for a long time, and in the next section, I will therefore present some key geographic concepts and findings in order to re-strengthen the competitive integration approach in a multiscalar perspective. The second shortfall is related to the first, it is the widespread absence of work and production processes as a structural feature of both Europeanisation and its comprehensive social crisis. In most of these political-economic European discussions work and production are only, if at all, represented in nationally aggregated data (wages, purchasing power, employment rates, productivity and so on). Given this situation, there is a need to bring back the capital-labour dimension in order to grasp similar features of increasingly fragmented and precarious labour processes across Europe and the corresponding everyday experiences of workers as a central aspect of current competitive Europeanisation and its crisis ([75]; [49]).

The important contribution of the geographical perspective to the European regime-competition perspective is to consider spatial dimensions and politics of scale as constitutive for competitive Europeanisation. Notably, economic and social geography criticises 'methodological nationalism' and the juxtaposition of the national and the European ([11], [12]; [98]). It insists on the importance of intra-national uneven development and the need to theorise it as an inherent systematic dimension of current Europeanisation.

Three interrelated concepts are crucial here, and I will briefly elaborate them: Scale, Rescaling and Glocalisation. Scale is a basic conception that focusses on the spatial dimensions of uneven (capitalist) societies; it questions the uneven reach of (conflicting) logics, interests and social practices, i.e. how they are structured by and in turn structure uneven spatial dimensions of norms, institutions and power. The relational character of the category is important to note, scales are not single entities or 'slices' but can only be grasped in their relational ensemble. Rescaling marks the change of these spatial dimensions in socioeconomic transformation processes; it focusses on the way in which changing power relations manifest in the reconfiguration of how the different socio-spatial scales (such as the local, regional, national, supranational and the global) relate to each other ([91]; [52]). Glocalisation, finally, is the specification of contemporary, neoliberal rescaling processes. The essence of this concept is to say that downscaling, i.e. limitation of specific (in this case socially protective and integrative) practices, norms and institutions to the national and subnational scale is the very converse of a socio-spatial upscaling, i.e. a generalisation of in this case (neoliberal) economic norms of competitiveness at the supranational, European and global scale. Glocalisation, hence, is more than a "twin process whereby firstly, institutional/regulatory arrangements shift from the national scale both upwards to supranational or global scales and downwards to the scale of the individual body or to local, urban or regional configurations" ([92]: 25). Beyond that, it grasps the social and spatial ruling or hegemonisation of one norm (i.e. potential attractiveness for transnational investment in the logic of capitalist competitiveness) in relation to the scalar limitation of social (and also ecological issues) on the national, regional and local level as the spatial form of their subordination to (institutionally) generalised capital's interests in competitiveness.

The basic concern in a critical European political economy of scale is how the European integration modus glocalises social policy. Following Neil [14] the neoliberal turn-away from what he calls the Keynesian national hierarchic-bureaucratic redistributive state project enhances local and regional governmental power and it goes along with rising particularisation with each localised scale trying to manifest "their own place-specific locational features" in relation to translocal and European funding systems and investors ([14]: 475). The explicit denial of the socio-spatial generalisation, i.e. harmonisation of social standards and social policy beyond nation-states, leads to the subordination to the above-mentioned logic: that socio-spatial difference (unevenness) will serve as competitive advantage. Without a strong socio-spatial counter-logic, fragmentation and particularisation is therefore taking hold on every socio-spatial scale, the national, but also the regional, local or (sub-)urban. European competition states therefore are "glocalising welfare/workfare states" ([70]), or "glocalising European competition states" ([14]). Competitive economic Europeanisation is based on national, but also on subnational fragmentation, it is multiscalar competitive integration. Rising national and intra-national uneven development belong together and are the very basic feature of competitive Europeanisation. The national state is not 'disappearing', on the contrary: it is a backbone of the multiscalar competitive European configuration, as it shapes or even pushes for subnational deregulation and fragmentation in order to strengthen national competitiveness.

Moreover, and as mentioned previously, scales are not independently existing slices but are to be analysed only in their relational ensemble. The scalar perspective, therefore, enables seeing that socio-political downscaling is not pure socio-spatial crumbling but the re-integration of the divided national and subnational spaces in a qualitatively new manner. It is, more precisely, the setting up of competitive relations "between workers and between places" as Jamie Peck (1996: 238) puts it. There are competitive relations between those socio-politically fragmented units which refer to and are structured in the upscaled (generalised/Europeanised) perspective of economic (capital's) attractiveness and competitiveness. The upscaling, i.e. the generalisation of the norm of competitiveness as institutionalised in the European treaties and the (new) European governance, is, in critical geography, not an external constraint to nation-states (even if this may exist), but is a relational component in the whole and interrelated (scalar) reconfiguration of (social) policy as subordinated to the primacy of attractiveness for (potential) investors. In geography, a vast body of literature deals with the transformation towards competitive regionalisation, localisation and (sub-)urbanisation.

One important reference is the change of local and regional governance towards 'urban entrepreneurialism' ([40]), another is the 'neoliberalising spaces' logic as political; it is regulation building and not abandoning the political to anonymous 'market forces' ([73]). A third important reference is competitive unevenness as a political (neoliberal) project in itself, with unevenness and fragmentation as constitutive and politically constituted ([73]). When it comes to social policy, one important topic is the opening of former municipal social infrastructure (in particular housing) for transnational capital investment and its effect on the urban-rural divide as well as the gentrification and segregation of urban space ([41]; [24]).

Another important topic is the transformation of regional and local governance towards competing for inward investment ([74]; [77]). In Europe, especially in the 1990s, a broad infrastructure of regional promotion agencies and special economic zones has been built up, among others with financial support from the European PHARE programme. Key incentives of this regionalised supply policy are low taxes and low land prices, in addition there is the offer of business-friendly infrastructure and administrative support, not least in the local provision of labour. Regionalised inward competition is principally run on all scales, it encompasses national states and it cuts through them with different regions/zones competing for the same investment ([47]). A third, related theme of competitive regionalisation as social policy is the establishment of municipal and local workfare policies, i.e. the restriction of social entitlements in order to render them contingent on both local labour market conditions and individual employability. Jamie Peck ([70], [71]; [72]) describes in detail how this localised policy is multiscalar in character. On the one hand, regulatory and financial responsibility and socioeconomic risks are being downscaled from national states, not only to subnational and local states, but also to private corporations, agencies of the social economy, and individual workers and welfare recipients. On the other hand, these new norms and infrastructures are channelled and institutionalised through a European network of policy advocates, intermediary agencies, global consultancy and quantitative evaluation schemes. The result is not a monolithic process of neoliberal convergence, but an interscalar rule regime in which socio-spatial "unevenness [serves] as a source of innovation and energy" ([70]:344). In other words, while social policy is on the one hand downscaled, workfare policy programmes are also upscaled in the form of their supra-regional and supranational standardisation. The emergence of a European market of transferable technocratic, administrative and calculative strategies allows for ongoing comparison of local, regional and national performances with the standardised criterion (see also [26]). Taking unevenness – and not socio-spatial harmonisation – as raison d'être, the European workfare policy is fast social policy ([70]): Ever new off-the-shelf policy fixes and 'best of strategies' are created, rendering the local scale as "a space of flux and continual adjustment" to permanent optimisation under the premise of competitiveness ([70]: 349f.). The national state moderates this process:

Postwelfare politics seem to be becoming more global and more local at the same time; while in the grey space between, national states continue to exert important influences, albeit framed in terms of narratives of powerlessness and an autocritique of past welfarist practices. (Peck 2002 : 332)

In addition, there are direct European interventions to promote multiscalar work-farism, particularly visible in the dismantling of collective bargaining and social systems in Greece, Portugal and Spain (see above). In sum, a glocalised, competitive forming of 'local' workforces develops:

[T]he new localism of neoliberal rhetoric is [...] selling the local to the global on terms determined by the imperatives of international competition and neoliberal policy. Suitable packaged, local labor qualities [...] their 'competitive priced work force' and the 'flexible attitudes and skills' [...] are traded on a global market as localities are forced to turn to a tired repertoire of inward investment promotion, local boosterism, and labor flexibility programs. (Peck 1996 : 238)

To sum up: the current competitive mode of Europeanisation is glocal in its character. Social policy is rescaled via a process of competitive fragmentation of nation-states but also regions, localities and workforce categories. The other side of multiscalar fragmentation is the upscaling of austerity norms and corresponding networks and policy instruments, directly strengthening the competitive supply-side character of social regimes.

What I propose in the final part of the article is to bring this scalar and glocal perspective into a discussion of labour and production processes as a crucial part of competitive Europeanisation and multiscalar regime competition. Indeed, the neoliberal competitive turn of Europeanisation has been programmatically pushed not only by financial but also by the producing fractions of transnational capital, i.e. transnational corporations and their lobby-groups ([93], [94]; [6]). Being confronted with an increasingly competitive European and global market environment, it was (and is) especially in their interest to use socio-political unevenness as an advantage for ongoing spatial restructuring ([10]). I argue in the following that the current social form of the configuration of labour and production processes is structurally similar to the glocalisation of statehood and (social) policy.

They are both structured by the same glocal competitive logic, i.e. economic integration via multiscalar socio-spatial fragmentation, with important

consequences for European people as social citizens and as workers. To bring the glocal configuration of labour and production processes into view it is necessary to recall the paradigmatic change in production since the late 1960s, its 'organizational revolution' (Sauer 2013). As widely discussed, this revolution echoes intensified global entrepreneurial competition, structural 'overaccumulation', increasingly disruptive and short-term market and technology development, and not least a growing financial sector as a catalyst of these phenomena ([82]). It should be noted that instead of the relatively long-term Fordist fixation of capital in robust and highly integrated production, now the ability to split up production and labour processes is crucial in order to recombine them in the short term according to the respective market conditions and corresponding 'optimization strategies'. Organisationally, there is internal and external segmentation; socially, there is the fragmentation of labour processes and working conditions along the hierarchical and horizontal dimension. Hierarchical fragmentation is best known as the fragmentation between so called 'high-end' or qualified workers and 'low-end' unqualified ones; horizontal social fragmentation, by contrast, targets the phenomenon that workers essentially perform equivalent tasks but under socially uneven conditions. Both are highly dynamic and do overlap.

Spatially, the flexible fragmentation/recombination of labour processes results in what is known as complex European and global production networks ([34]). Social and organisational segmentation coincides with spatial segmentation. Firms reorganise the entire production process spatially, i.e. they relocate both internal and external segments to other locations, regions and countries. Indeed, the fragmentation/recombination of labour processes is profoundly multiscalar. This can be seen from a brief look at the important debates about changes in production since the 1970s and the spatial dimensions to which they refer.

The first is the debate about the 'New Division of Labour' that deals with the international relocation of 'low-end' labour towards countries from the Global South and particularly also the European (semi-)periphery, such as Central and Eastern Europe, Spain, Portugal or Tunisia. Textile and electronic industries and (feminised) Taylorist work on assembly lines stand paradigmatically for this process ([31]; [86]). The second important debate is grouped around the concept of the 'Spatial Division of Labour' ([65]). Here, intra-regional fragmentation and relocation of labour processes are in the focus, particularly the relocation of (often female and migrant) 'low-end' labour in the inner peripheries, i.e. sparsely industrialised or particularly vulnerable regions with high unemployment. The third important debate reflecting the post-Fordist transformation of labour and production processes and refers to the local scale. This is the mainly sociological 'Fragmenting Work' discussion that analyses workers' fragmentation, precarisation and informalisation on the shop floor ([37]; [28]; Castel/Dörre 2010).

With a transdisciplinary view we see here in a nutshell the multiscalar character of labour's and labour processes' fragmentation. On the different scales, these debates focus on the socio-spatial disintegration of labour processes and "the effect of fundamentally fracturing employment relations across and within member states" ([76]: 207, emphasis added). All discussion lines address – for the different scales – labour's rising social vulnerability. Taken together, they show that – across Europe – socio-spatial fragmentation leads to (very) low wages, often far removed from a living wage, far-reaching exclusion from welfare institutions via repressive neoliberal workfarism, ongoing socio-political deregulation, and the de facto widespread exclusion from effective trade union representation ([63]; [29]; Selwyn et al. 2020; [47]).

As argued at the beginning of the article, scales and their reconfiguration must be thought of as a relational ensemble. In the glocal rescaling framework, therefore, socio-spatial fragmentation is not purely falling apart, not simply crumbling into pieces. Rather, it is the other side of the powerful upscaling of investors' capacities and their competitiveness logic on the European scale. This relational focus on downscaling (fragmentation) and upscaling (generalisation of particular norms and interests) is especially important with regard to labour and production processes: Enthusiasm for modern 'flat' network organisations has often overlooked that the multiple and multiscalar fragmentation of labour processes was from the beginning accompanied by its 'counterpart', the translocal and transnational centralisation of control and steering ([33]). From the outset, digital standardisation technologies have been crucial in this respect, as they allow the now numerically processed work and production results to be measured and combined in a comparative manner across the increasingly complex transnational production networks. In fact, the capacity to define technological standards is a key element for a 'lead-firm' position and its position of power in transnationalised production. Standardisation and digitisation are the other side of multiple, multiscalar and fast changing organisational and spatial fragmentations ([23]; [97]). Standardisation and digitisation directly shape the labour and production processes, for example with regard to technology, workplace design and operational procedures or network-wide optimisation campaigns.

Additionally, they are particularly important as a tool for the permanent (comparative) control of the work. Fragmented labour processes are steadily compared against each other in terms of costs, efficiency, flexibility, quality or customer satisfaction or they compete directly in benchmark processes for predetermined target margins and the 'award' of (further) investments ([36]). The competitive comparison reaches as far as individual production lines, working groups and individual workers; it is an everyday component of the labour process, for example through steady target-performance visualisations, regular 'team meetings' for evaluation and optimisation and of course also in the form of digitised, personalised control of individual work steps (via scanners, observation cameras, digital glasses, etc.).

Not only are parameters such as 'self-responsible' cost savings, output and quality standardised and measured, but also the willingness to work flexibly, punctuality, attendance rates or cleanliness at the workplace are processed numerically and are reflected, for example, in the reduced payment of variable wage components ([61]). In short, labour's fragmentation is not a pure organisational falling apart but the re-integration of socio-spatial fragments into an upscaled capitalist logic of control, steering and valorisation strategies, exercised on the basis of far-reaching organisational and spatial mobility and mutability. With centralised (digital) control, the competitive relations between the multiple and multiscalar fragmented workforces receive a manifest form. There is permanent comparison between the organisational, social and spatial fragments that constitute transnationalised labour processes. Additionally, there is an ongoing technological (mainly digital) transformation that may include improvements for some, but entails, to a large extent, the transformation of former 'high-end' work (basically in the white-collar domains) into strict Taylorised/standardised (click-)work, which is especially easy to spread spatially.

Generally summarised, and in an important parallel to social policy, the upscaling of norms of capitalist competitiveness (in the form of their technological, technocratic and numeric standardisation) is the other side of multiscalar socio-spatial fragmentation and creates competitive relations between the fragments. Also working populations in the semi-periphery, for example, are confronted with the threat of further relocation, as firms' competition on costs and flexibility and their 'need' to keep wages low is an ongoing process ([61]: 200ff.). Whereas social policy is 'fast' due to continuously and rapidly changing 'best of' political strategies, the same is true for production, where one optimisation strategy follows the other, resulting in permanent restructuring and a fundamentally unstable division of labour – on all scales of work and production.

Employability or attractiveness in a competitive sense, in other words, are profoundly relative, i.e. limited in time and space, with ever changing countries, regions or workforces as pioneers and milestones for further benchmarking and deregulation. In both spheres, in production and beyond, we see furthermore that trade unions typically follow corporatist strategies in order to attract or to keep jobs and income in the respective locality, region, production line, enterprise or nation-state ([87]; [8]; [64]; [59]) – without being able, however, to break with the ruling logic of integration via multiscalar fragmentation and to turn Europeanisation into an integrative mode. Social standards are not simply swept away in this process but in their subordination to the primacy of competitiveness they are continuously fragmented and comprehensively degraded.

In this article I have argued that there is a need to enlarge the perspective on Europeanisation as socio-political regime competition, first, in a geographical, multiscalar perspective, and second with regard to labour and production processes. After introducing basic geographical concepts, I analysed current Europeanisation as a glocal configuration in which inter-national and intra-national unevenness cling together.

They are both constitutive in a political-economic form of European integration that takes socio-spatial difference as an enhancement for investment and growth. The common juxtaposition of the national and the European scale, with the latter hindering national sovereignty and exit from regime competition, therefore falls short. It misses the national state transformation into glocalising competition states and that the competitive architecture of Europeanisation is, in itself, a reflection of this transformation. Moreover, it misses the fragmented-transnationalised social form of organising capitalist production as one of the fundaments and drivers of competitive Europeanisation. I then argued that there is a parallel, glocal form of both social policy and the reconfiguration of labour and production processes in Europe.

Glocal competitive Europeanisation compromises not only state and currency policy; rather it also constitutes a way to organise capitalist production. With neoliberal-negative integration, the main feature of both – social policy and capitalist production – is a (supranational) upscaling of technocratic surveillance and control in the name of the norm of profit-oriented competitiveness on the one hand and the dynamic multiscalar competitive socio-spatial fragmentation on the other. Given the harsh cost-capability competition firms face on the post-growth contingent European and global markets ([22]), the concrete socio-spatial configuration of labour processes is under pressure to permanently revise and 'optimise', hence, unstable and restless. As for the case in social policy, ever further dynamic fragmentation, and not market equilibrium, is the logic of this process.

The result is a highly variegated landscape of fragmented working and living conditions, on all socio-spatial scales in Europe, with undoubtedly some (still) relatively well situated groups of workers and social systems, and a growing number of working people who are confronted with ever new forms of socio-political recommodification and precarisation.

In view of this principally (glocal) competitive structure of Europeanisation, a range of analysts ask how European social policy can nevertheless be strengthened as a policy field and what (limited) effects various European initiatives and institutional pillars have ([56]; [38]). Thus, former Commission President Juncker's large-scale campaign for a European Pillar of Social

Rights, to give just one example, is to be seen as symbolic, precisely because it does not contain any enforceable rights ([84]). On the other hand, there are currently more optimistic views on the activities of the current Commission towards a European minimum wage (which, however, still have to be proven, [84]). Another example of a possible and slight institutional rebalancing is a 2019 ECJ ruling that allows on-call time to be declared as working time in certain circumstances and reduces the average calculation from 48 hours per week to 17 weeks (instead of one year under the Directive).

In my conclusion, however, I want to come back to the scale debate in geography and remind that scale, rescaling and glocalisation mark qualitative transformations. The institutionalised upscaling of post-Fordist capitalist (i.e. short-term, cost- and flexibility-oriented) norms of competitiveness is their political generalisation as an inescapable requirement to which actors at all levels (from the European to the national and regional down to the individual) must subordinate. Competitive Europeanisation through multiscalar fragmentation means that, at all levels, norms, institutions and practices of social integration, collegiality and solidarity are – politically – rendered secondary (and instrumental) to the overwhelming goal of meeting the (constantly renewed) competitive requirements. In other words, the basic idea that workers and their representative organisations can inscribe their social interests in the competitive strategies of capitalist enterprises and political state apparatuses is at an end, up to the point that social participation is redefined as participation in labour markets under whatever conditions ([75]). The strong discursive connection between the goal of profit-oriented competitiveness and that of social cohesion turns out to be the dominant quest for the adaptability of the labour force to the exigencies of competitiveness in a global and European economy – again, on all scales of (re-)production.

Consequently, in a glocal perspective and for a different hegemony project ([16]), the issue is not the exit of a given local, regional or national scale. Scales mark the spatial dimension of social unevenness, the uneven reach of conflicting interests and logics, but scales are not singular existing slices occupied by different social actors (capital and labour in this case). The national scale, hence, cannot be 'broken out' of the scalar ensemble. What is needed, instead, is the redefinition of a societal project that questions profit-led competition, on all scales, including the very local shop floor.

In this sense, the widespread slogan that trade unions should overcome the national scale and should become more European is also misleading in some ways. In a glocal perspective, trade unions and social democrats in a broad sense are European – meaning that they participate in the competitive framing of this scale, for example with regard to site competition, (failing) national collective bargaining coordination or leaving the progressive government in Greece alone to face the Troika. Trade unions are European, and have been for quite a while, but their hegemonic incorporation into glocalising competition not only dramatically weakens effective social representation but also effectively hinders speaking out for a different, socially integrative project of Europeanisation, nationalisation and regionalisation (see [46]). The problem, hence, is not to make the step from the national to the European (as scales exist only in their relational ensemble) but to change the existing (European) trade union policy in order to stop the competitive attitude towards other countries, regions or production sites. It would be a task for another contribution to show that such a multiscalar realignment must include a notion of labour that is not oriented to achieving the competitive success of this or that firm, production site, region or country. Instead, and in particular when it comes to the socio-ecological transformation strongly needed, the trade union movement could remind itself of the much larger ideas of the work it is based on, namely work as a social and useful activity for people and society ([18]; [50]).