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The impact of the European Union on the social policies of its Member States can generally be described in terms of domestication, assimilation, and disarmament. Social policy has been domesticated in the sense of remaining largely within the competence of the Member States, however, it is also subject to constraints by the law of the internal market. Assimilation has occurred where the fundamental freedoms were used in order to make social benefits move across national bounds. Disarmament is epitomized by monetary union and by recent developments in the Court’s case law that have moved beyond domestication and ushered in a new era of market liberalisation. The development affects, in particular, industrial relations and systems of collective wage determination. The rise to prominence of European anti-discrimination law needs be seen and assessed against this background.

What sort of relationships did anticolonial mobilizations for national sovereignty forge between faith and politics, sacrifice and democracy, philosophy and resistance? This chapter traces a crucial moment in this genealogy to 1914-15, when Gandhi returned to India after spending two decades in South Africa, and Ambedkar arrived in New York as a student at Colombia University. Over the next three decades, the two created an unparalleled body of work engaged with questions of belief, action, and truth, replacing the nationalist aspiration for sovereignty with a resolute commitment to what this book calls unconditional equality. Reconstructing their inseparable and irreconcilable convictions, reclaiming the richness of Ambedkar’s formulation “faith in equality” as an interpretive, performative, and methodological coup de force, this chapter charts out an alternative history of ethical responsibility and political realism in the modern nonwest. At stake, it argues, is the tension between the political and “the social question” itself.

Marx, Durkheim and Weber overturned classical ideas about law and politics dating from Aristotle to Montesquieu. For turn-of-the-century social theorists, the separation of powers was as an epiphenomenal reflection of class struggles, part of a larger evolutionary process, or a feeble bulwark against the terrifying consequences of such processes. In “totalitarian” states, party monopolies were created that used the awesome power of modern bureaucracies, with science and advanced technology at their disposal, to shape and control opinion through propaganda and surveillance. Even within democratic states, the spread of administration and the expansion of welfare functions seemed to undermine the separation of powers. By the mid-twentieth century, a more “realistic” theory of electoral democracy emerged that downplayed the role of deliberation and notions of the public good. Drawing an analogy between politics and markets, the separation of powers was replaced by the idea of equilibrium.

In the aftermath of the First World War, Bombay witnessed workers’ upsurges on an unprecedented scale. In order to cope with this new situation, the colonial authorities and the millowners alternated between repression and acclimation of methods, which had proven to be successful in England to abate social unrest. Building quarters to house the workers was one of them. This chapter begins by setting colonial intervention in its wider context, questioning the very limited role private employers played in the field of workers’ housing. It then studies how intervention of the authorities had unexpected effects that totally contradicted the initial aim of their building programed, which was to regulate workers’ unrest. It rather encouraged the development of solidarities that opened up new spaces of politicization and arenas of struggle.