Corporate Social Responsibility in the EU Regulation

The paper aims to introduce the milestones in the EU regulation on corporate social responsibility (CSR) in general with a special focus on small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). EU regulation is introduced based on EU documents and international and Hungarian literature. The debate about CSR began in the 1990s in Europe and after the turn of the millennium several papers, guidelines, and directives attempt to provide a common approach about it. However, CSR relates mainly to big companies still today, smallerfirms can also implement CSR. Despite that research on SMEs’ CSR started after 2000, EU documents already highlighted from the beginning of the 2000s the importance of smaller companies as well, and in 2002 the European Commission drew up a strategy for SMEs. The paper illustrates not only the papers and SMEs’ role but also provides ideas about the sense of the EU regulation on CSR and collects the reasons why couldit be beneficial to have a debate and approach about CSR at the EU level. The paper also presents some information about how the SMEs’ CSR features comply with interview research among SMEs in Győr, Hungary in 2021–2022. It is possible to believe that learning the European approach may contribute to thinking in a more integrated way about how to behave socially responsibly and how to manage social impact.