Anniek de Ruijter

Mapping the institutional consolidation of EU human health expertise

The EU’s role in the field of human health is solidifying in terms of law and policy, but also with respect to the institutional organisation of human health expertise. In light of the emerging health-care union and questions regarding the nature and scope of a European health law, the institutional organisation deserves attention as it may affect the nature of the policy and law in this field. Looking back in history, this article maps the consolidation of human health expertise in the main legislative and policy-making institutional actors in the European Union: The European Commission; the European Parliament; the Council of the European Union; and the European Agencies and committees.

Healthcare and the Lisbon strategy

The health of a population is a key contributor to sustained economic and social development (WHO 2010). Along with public-health policies, effective healthcare systems are an important part of securing population health. So, when the European Union (EU) set itself a growth target in the 2000 Lisbon, we could have expected that healthcare would form a central platform of the Agenda. In fact, the pattern of the EU’s engagement with healthcare through the Lisbon Agenda has been patchy, and, when compared with other ‘social’ areas (in particular, employment), it has been severely under-developed and lacking political saliency. Nevertheless, the healthcare example reveals some evidence of Europeanisation taking place both within and, perhaps more importantly, alongside the Lisbon Agenda. Most interestingly, healthcare policy exemplifies an area where interactions between the ‘new’ governance promulgated by Lisbon and the ‘old’ law of the internal market (going beyond Bulmer’s comparison [Chapter 3 in this volume] of those two ‘governance architectures’ [Borras and Radaelli 2011a]) could potentially combine to contribute to resolving the ‘constitutional’ legitimacy gap between the ‘economic’ and the ‘social’ in policy development of the EU.