INTRODUCTION instance, Macedonia follows this pattern and is close to NATO membership in ad­vance of any membership in the EU. On surface, the European Union stretches from the Atlantic to the Black Sea. But here in Skopje we are probably all well aware of that there are exceptions to this pattern. Of all the new nation-states in this part of the Europe, only Greece and Bulgaria are full members of the Union. You could add Slovenia and R о mania if you are meticulous. Macedonia, or FYROM, nowadays belongs to those countries that are at the negotiation table, together with Croatia, while Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, and Serbia still are hang-around, far from prospects. Turkey is somewhere in between, formally at the table but actually in limbo since Merkel and Sarkozy joined forces. I have not mentioned Moldavia, Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia or Armenia. Putin´s Russia is of course the name of the game, and – the United States of America, maybe also China, India and Indonesia, not to speak of Israel and Venezuela. Or Cuba and other on and off listed failed, rough, pirate states. To invoke the Washington con­sensus in a European context is, thus, not taken completely out of the blue. Social Politics So far I have been talking real politics and geopolitics, power but not social poli­tics. Implicating the European Union, though, you also allude to its social dimen­sion, its Method of Open Coordination, and its social protocol(Jacobsson 2004). Maybe even a more or less universal European Social Model for all and everybody in contrast to a residual American welfare model in which welfare is synonymous with the poor and antipoverty programs – a reconstructed Fourth way instead of the deconstructed Third-First(Hanssen, Hort& Kuhnle 2007). In a broader European perspective, you can also refer to the Social charter of the European Council and the citizenship rights associated with this corpus. In Europe, there has for a long time, longer than a fifty years period, been something close to“social politics”, or mass/class politics at the national level though circumscribed on the supra-national. However, as far as I have understood, in the English language, social politics is a rather recent English or American invention visible for instance in the title of a so­cial science journal from the 1990s published by an American University Press and edited by an American scholar living in the Far North of Europe. This journal is an example of an ambition from the academic world to reach out to an audience at least partly outside the boundaries of the Ivory Tower. Gender and social policy has been at the forefront of this journal. Feminist politics is on its way to become more or less mainstreamed social mass politics. When the poor as well as the working class movement reached the public agenda during the 19 th century in Europe, the poverty issue became part and parcel of the “worker question”; la Question Social in French, or Arbeiterfrage in German. On the periphery of the Far North, poverty going public also meant a normative stance 17