| Summary: | Since the end of the 1990’s, the reinforcement of control over unemployed people in Western European countries raises two questions. From an old and traditionally marginal property of unemployment policies, how was control promoted to a major goal? Why do different national policies of unemployment support converge on this regard, even when the European Union does not have direct competence on this matter? To answer these questions, three levels of analyses are sketched. At first, the description of the historic evolutions that affected unemployment and its public treatment, specifically through the process of desobjectivation of unemployment and the instauration of socio-political power relations unfavourable to unemployed, that we widely find on an European scale. Then the establishment of elective affinities, in the sense of Max Weber, between the pattern of active social State promoted at the supranational plan, and the rigorist orientations of the treatment of the unemployed that we find at the national plan. In short, the analysis, starting from the French case, of the uses of international comparison shows how policies obeying to national logics can give them selves European tendencies that they, on their turn, contribute to achieve
|
|---|