Against the background of an ever more economically integrated European Union (EU), there have been diverse attempts to add a social dimension to the process of ongoing integration the latest of which is to be found in the Open Method of co-ordination (OMC), installed officially during the Lisbon summit in 2000. This soft law instrument – used in a variety of policies areas such as employment, social inclusion, pensions, immigration policy, amongst others – is to produce convergence in policy outcome in the respective fields of the member states of the EU. It is an instrument which supposedly respects the diversity of national institutional settings, programmes and ideas of justice while leading the member states to similar standards in their welfare mix as well as to the modernisation of the so-called European Social Model. This project is looking at the social inclusion process inaugurated in 2000. The choice of the OMC rests upon two main criteria: 1 Due to the newness of the process, there has hardly been any empirical work on the implementation of this process; 2. An underlying thesis is that if the EU is not to come up with a stronger social role, it will have to face severe political and social challenges in the future which might very well put into question the integration process as a whole. Along with this thesis goes the assumption that the nation-states are no longer capable of counter-balancing the consequences of economic and fiscal integration on their own.
France and Germany have been chosen for this comparative work and this is so for different reasons. Firstly, these two countries belong to the same welfare family, thus bringing along comparable institutional arrangements (despite important differences). This likeliness becomes important when assuming that policy learning and policy transfer – two of the main goals of the OMC – are more feasible in comparable institutional settings. Second, they differ quite markedly in their national traditions and conceptions of the organisation of the polity as well as in their actual government constellations. It thus will be interesting to see which factors shape the implementation process in which ways. While these two member states will be at the heart of the study, we shall nevertheless look at the United Kingdom as well as to Sweden in order to be able to assess the outcomes of the study in an even more differentiated way.
Finally, this project will explicitly not (directly) address labour market strategies to reduce social exclusion, dealt with elsewhere more prominently (European Employment Strategy), but will focus on target groups that are commonly associated with a social stigma and thereby illustrate the fact that people are being excluded by others (such as ethnic minorities, single mothers or handicapped).
Against this institutional background, we will analyse the processes of the drawing-up of the National Action Plans (NAPincl) as the key national element of the OMC as well as the estimated impact of the OMC on the development of policies (output-analysis, not outcome).
Concluding, we will have to evaluate if there are indices that this instrument of policy-making in the EU is capable of producing the intended results or not in the field of social inclusion and what this could potentially mean for the development of alternative instruments.
There are several underlying hypothesises to this study three of which shall be named here: 1. The path dependency of institutionalised welfare arrangements is too strong for such a soft instrument to bring about significant modifications; 2) The theoretical assumptions underlying the OMC – as outlined in theories such as directly deliberative polyarchy, proceduralisation or democratic experimentalism – are not feasible in reality as they tend to underestimate (if not forget) real power hierarchies as well as (administrative) political cultures. Furthermore, there would need to be a much more developed European public in order for the “naming and shaming” procedures to have any political impact and 3) The on-going “discourses” about in- and outsiders, about what “social justice” should mean practically and what not, as well as the labour market oriented activation strategies do not point in the direction of the development of integrated policies against social exclusion and therefore render the likelihood of a success story even smaller.