The Open Method of Co-ordination and the European Welfare State

Abstract

Open Method Co-ordination (OMC) has been treated in the literature as the Lazarus of European integration. Developed at the Lisbon Summit, it has led to the reincarnation of the European Union, both in terms of what it does and how it does it. No longer is the European Union to be centred around the Classic Community Method (CCM) of supranational management of regulation. Instead, it is to be a decentred participatory process, in which national governments are no longer controlled and commanded by the imperatives of EC law, but rather commit themselves to review each other's programmes in the light of a series of mutually agreed standards and of domestic and trans-national participatory processes. The European Council and its surrounding machinery is placed at the heart of the Union's policy process, and new types of Union-Member State relations are forged which are centred less around classical legal prescriptions, and more around diffuse national adaptation to a wide array of transnational norms, whose form and origin varies (for initial review, see Hodson and Maher 2001)

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