The European Union - The Political Geography of Inequality - page 83

Supporters of a stronger social Europe had to wait until the Lisbon Summit
(2000) to restate their case, launching a new approach: the open method of
coordination (OMC). 12 Essentially, the OMC implies the setting of common
policy purposes while leaving the choice of actual policies to national gov-
ernments. This approach recognizes that “under the principle of subsidiarity,
social policy remains the responsibility of the Member States. It was agreed that
each Member State should implement a national two-year action plan for com-
bating poverty and social exclusion, setting specific targets. [ ....]TheOMC
involves using a management by objectives approach, whereby EU institutions
draw up guidelines and monitor their implementation” (Atkinson 2002 : 628).
The policy format of such an attempt to integrate social policy in the Euro-
pean Union remains undefined. 13 This ambiguity aside, one major conclusion
stands out (Scharpf 1998 , 2002 ; Seabright 1993 ): the only EU social policy
that is likely to be feasible in the future would be a regulation such that a set of
common standards is agreed upon by the EU executive powers and the member
states are left with the freedom to choose the ways and means to achieve it.
And even this approach is bound to meet considerable resistance. In a political
context in which regional leaders are mainly obliged towards their local con-
stituencies, disagreements about the nature and scope of such a move appear
far too large given Europe's economic geography. This scenario is unlikely to
change in the context of a Union enlarged to twenty-seven members.

Assessing the Mechanisms: Economic Geography and Institutional
Preferences in the EU
In an effort to validate the mechanisms posited in the theoretical model, I turn
now to analyze the extent to which Europe's economic geography accounts for
disagreements about the design of fiscal institutions. I present several analyses
of how macrolevel indicators of countries' politico-economic conditions shape
the preferences of citizens, political organizations, and governments. The goal
throughout is to evaluate the connection between countries' relative positions

12 The OMC was originally established in the Maastricht Treaty for the coordination of economic
policies, and expanded in the Amsterdam Treaty to labor market policies. Then, during the
Lisbon Summit, the Council agreed to start using it to approach social-policy issues. Detailed
characterizations of the use of the OMC in the realm of social policy can be found in Scharpf
( 2002 ); and Vandenbroucke ( 2002 ).

13

Scharpf has suggested that a combination of framework directives and the OMC could meet the
task (2002). The first tool would allow the Commission to punish those states failing to meet the
agreed standards; the latter would allow countries to retain autonomy even if agreeing to a set
of common measures and standards on the basis of which to be evaluated. In this way, “member
states would retain considerable discretion in shaping the substantive and procedural content
framework directives to suit specific local conditions and preferences. Yet if they should abuse
this discretion in the political judgment of their peers in the Council, more centralized sanctions
and enforcement procedures would still be available as a 'fleet in being.'” (Scharpf 2002 : 34).
In contrast, Vandenbroucke ( 2002 ) considers this combination of framework directives and
the OMC potentially counterproductive as it is likely to foster distributive political contentions
among member states.