Redistribution and social investments. a soft power perspective on european welfare

Amid overlapping crises and growing territorial disparities, the European Union increasingly relies on social policy as a tool of cohesion. Internally, redistribution through welfare plays a key role in stabilizing peripheral regions and mitigating tensions between more affluent “frugal” countries and less wealthy Member States. Externally, Europe’s social model can be understood as a form of global soft power, offering a normative alternative to the neoliberal governance of the United States and the state-driven model of China. Against this backdrop, while substantial literature addresses regional disparities and EU social investment strategies, less attention has been paid to welfare policy as a geopolitical instrument, both in terms of internal stabilization within the EU and as a global cultural project competing with other governance models. This research seeks to fill the gap by investigating how redistributive welfare policies act as internal geopolitical tools for stabilizing intra-European asymmetries, and function externally as instruments of soft power, positioning the “Social Europe” model within a global competition of governance regimes. The study adopts a qualitative, reflexive approach: it combines discourse analysis (policy narratives and normative frames) with comparative examination of selected EU cases (e.g. “frugal” versus “peripheral” Member States) to trace the spatial and temporal evolution of EU welfare strategies, with a focus on cohesion policy and social investment within broader power dynamics. The study is expected to illustrate how: i) the “Social Europe” model holds soft power potential as a normative and cultural alternative to dominant global governance styles; ii) a minimal shared principle of solidarity and reciprocity is necessary for a sustainable and integrated European social model; iii) contrary to expectations, current welfare arrangements produce clear distinctions between “insiders” and “outsiders”, with implications for the coherence of EU citizenship and for the stability of the Union itself.