The work presented here has the ambitious objective to analyse a highly topical issue not in the usual terms of finding an immediate answer to pressing questions of political urgency, but to find such answers notwithstanding the abstract approach of a fundamental reinterpretation of the issue in question. The topical side of the question is focussing on services of general interest, a matter that is closely linked to the European strategy of market liberalisation and to what is called the European Social Model. In this sense, the question of services of general interest, and with this the question of social services as specific form of services of general interest is path-dependent, linked to the orientation of European integration as establishing a single market, based on the four fundamental freedoms, namely the: free movement of capital; free movement of goods; freedom of movement for workers and freedom of establishment and provision of services and mutual recognition of diplomas.