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This chapter highlights the origins of, and motivations for, EU interventions to combat poverty and social exclusion in the 1980s and 1990s, and contrasts these with the explicit treaty commitments to combat social exclusion and new policy objectives of modernizing social protection systems emerging in the late 1990s. The development of the Lisbon strategy in 2000 provided a policy context and matrix for the articulation of these new commitments and objectives with the OMC as the governance tool for their implementation. In detail, the chapter explores the development and institutionalization of the architectural elements of EU social policy coordination, from the adoption of common objectives and indicators, to the production of national action plans, joint reports, and peer reviews. Notwithstanding the absence of more legally-defined processes, what emerged was a highly institutionalized process through recursive interaction of governmental and non-governmental actors.

This chapter compares the Europe 2020 strategy with the Lisbon strategy from 2000. It shows how the intentions behind the Lisbon strategy to promote knowledge-based economic growth with more social cohesion were given after only five years and how the Open Method of Coordination was too soft for implementing the intentions behind the strategy. The weaknesses that made the Lisbon strategy insufficient as scaffolding for the Euro-collaboration remain in the Europe 2020 strategy, and now, only a movement towards a European Economic and Social Union, with strong focus upon more social and more regional cohesion, can save the European project. But this would require a kind of leadership, common vision and capacity to build democratic support currently missing in Europe.

This chapter considers the various interventions of the political institutions in the labour law field both in their own right, and in the context of the approach of the Court (analysed in detail in Chapter 4). Harmonization, minimum standard-setting, and the open method of coordination (OMC) are discussed with reference to their capacity to achieve the integrationist, economic, and social objectives of the European Union, and to the constraints imposed by the principles of subsidiarity and proportionality. The Working Time Directive and Lisbon Strategy are subjected to close scrutiny.

This chapter discusses how important the EU's involvement in education has been. It outlines Europe's demographic development, the change in labor markets and human resources. The interaction of these three areas of society points to an enormous need for action. It then discusses how to gauge the level of education in a population, and what absolute and relative measures of educational achievement could look like. It examines the educational policy objectives formulated by the EU, and describes to what extent the European countries have already accomplished them. The chapter discusses two fundamental questions: first, how coherent are the individual goal dimensions of the Lisbon strategy and what can we learn from the degree of their correlation for future empirical research on education? Second, what do the indicators allow us to say about issues of equal opportunity and social exclusion in European countries, and how much diversity is there within Europe in this respect? It concludes with a summary illustrating the analytical potential of the indicators and showing that purportedly simple measures have more to them than first meets the eye.

This concluding chapter summarizes the main findings of the book. It is argued that the Court's case law institutionalizes tensions between the integrationist objectives of the EU and the economic and social objectives of national regulation in the labour law field which need not exist. The interventions of the political institutions appear less hostile to diversity; but they tend systematically to privilege the economic over the social. It is argued that a clear commitment to the social rationale and a reorientation of the Lisbon Strategy to would contribute towards the legitimacy of the European polity.

This chapter categorises the various objectives which EU intervention in domestic labour law may be thought to serve into three broad rationales, and draws out the implications which a commitment to each of the integrationist, economic, and social rationale may, or must, entail. Much of the focus is on the integrationist rationale, and to a critique of the various actors' understanding of the elimination of barriers to free movement and distortions of competition. It is suggested that mere differences between national laws need not be seen as problematic from the perspective of market integration — contrary to the dominant strand of the Court of Justice's case law. The impact of EMU is considered as well as the relationships between the economic and social objectives which may underlie EU intervention, in the light of the evolution of the Lisbon Strategy.

This chapter presents a brief historical account of the development of EU cooperation in social policy from the Treaty of Rome to the re-focused Lisbon Strategy post-March 2005, and the adoption of new working arrangements and revised objectives for the Open Method of Coordination on social protection and social inclusion in March 2006, leading up to the proposed designation of 2010 as the ‘European Year of combating poverty and social exclusion’.

This chapter does three things. First, it compares the British approach to labour market regulation with the approaches of the OECD, on the one hand, and the European Community, on the other. Second, it develops a typology of regulatory strategies for implementing labour market regulation and analyses the major developments described in the book according to this typology. Third, it argues that the role for employment law under the approach adopted by ‘New Labour’ is seen as far more challenging and sophisticated than its role under either the traditional doctrine of collective laissez-faire or the deregulatory policies of its Conservative predecessors.

This chapter considers the challenge of advancing the Social Inclusion Process in the context of the re-focused Lisbon Strategy, and of embedding the Process in domestic policies and implementing a social-inclusion mainstreaming through establishing a scheme of systematic policy assessments at EU, national, and sub-national levels. It proposes the setting of targets, fundamentally restructured NAPs/inclusion, and working towards more ‘joined-up’ government, on the basis of committed administrative and political leadership, and parliamentary scrutiny. The chapter also stresses the importance of raising awareness of the Social Inclusion Process, and of further mobilising the different actors involved in the fight against poverty and social exclusion at the subnational, national, and EU levels.

In recent years, the European integration project has become increasingly controversial in the polarised political landscaped of the Netherlands. The legality of engaging in further deepening and broadening of EU integration, in terms of the further enlargement of the EU and a sensitive constitutional discourse on it, has been challenging in Dutch society, which has been formerly and traditionally been supportive of the EU. This chapter discusses the Netherlands' social and economic normalisation during the period of the EU controversy. The Dutch politicians failed to communicate European policies to their public. Therefore, a political controversy on EU socio-economic policy directions occurred in the Netherlands. While the Dutch socio-economic policy of the 1990s fed the European socio-economic discourse, to which the Kok reports and the Lisbon Strategy testify, the European socio-economic policy agenda has reinforced national reforms in the Netherlands. In recent years, three social policy reforms in the Netherlands were intensified by the EU: the reforms of disability pensions, the prevention of long-term unemployment, and the equal treatment of dossier.

Policy coordination in one form or another has been a feature of EU governance for the past two decades. Developing initially as a mechanism through which to coordinate national economic policies in the shadow of economic and monetary union (EMU), and extending to the coordination of employment policies through the European Employment Strategy, by the 2000s, policy coordination was being heralded as a new form of governance to be deployed to achieve the aims of the Lisbon Strategy of economic and social reform. Indeed, such was the interest in this new form of EU governance, it even acquired its own distinctive nomenclature—the ‘open method of coordination’ (OMC).

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.

European social policy has evolved significantly since the late 1980s, when the idea of a social dimension to the EU emerged onto European policy agendas. By the turn of the early 1990s, the common points of departure were the concepts of subsidiarity and proportionality, both of which underlined the limited competence of the European level to proceed in this field. Today, following the introduction of the Lisbon Strategy and the open method of coordination (OMC), attention has been focused on the social aspects of European integration at the European level. This chapter discusses and clarifies the key issues debated in the previous chapters and aims to draw together some policy conclusions. It begins by discussing the European social model concept, and assesses its potential usefulness in European social policy debates, identifying at least ten of its dimensions. The chapter ends with policy conclusions on the question of whether there is a need for new balance in social policy between the Member States and the EU.

This chapter sets the scene and introduces the context and contents of this book. The book aims to describe the progress made since Lisbon with the EU Social Inclusion Process, and to examine the challenges faced in taking forward the Process in new circumstances. Its central subject is the future implementation of the Social Inclusion Process. The chapter outlines the contents of each of the subsequent chapters, and seeks to set the European debate in a wider global context. Since 2000, there has been significant progress in the EU approach to social inclusion. The discussion also describes the concepts of enlargement, global poverty, and children mainstreaming.

The paper addresses the reframing of "universities" in EU policy discourse since the launch of the Lisbon strategy in 2000. It shows how and why universities came to be understood as investment objects for private investors. Hence, the study focuses on the development of an argumentative arsenal aimed at justifying and legitimizing capitalist working logics in higher education. At the centre of our theoretical approach to this discursive form of institutionalization lies the notion of "test" and "critique" as developed by Boltanski and Chiapello. We therefore work with EU policy documents spanning a 5 year period (from 2003 to 2008) and analyse how the discursive construction of higher education investments went hand in hand with the institutionalisation of a European benchmark.

This chapter talks about developments found at the level of the European Union (EU). It presents a discursive analysis of a selection of policy documents of the EU that are relevant in the context of activation policies. One of these is the documents that were produced in the context of the Lisbon Strategy and the European Employment Strategy (EES). The chapter also considers the political status and the paradoxical rhetoric of European discourse.

The shape and content of the EU budget define what the EU wants to be, what it can actually do, its nature, and its aspirations. As often happens with the EU, much depends on the terms of comparison: the Union budget, which is slightly higher than 1 per cent of the EU Gross National Income (GNI), is much smaller than the budgets of most Member States but, at the same time, it is three times bigger than that of the United Nations. Its size and, even more so, the EU procedures which set its expenditures—apart from its revenues—reveal that the EU aims to be something different from a mere international organization.