Paul Copeland

Policy windows, ambiguity and Commission entrepreneurship: explaining the relaunch of the European Union's economic reform agenda

This article explains the relaunch of the European Unions (EU) economic reform agenda in 2010. After repeated delays during 2009, the European Commission scaled back its initial plan for a revived social dimension and instead proposed a strengthened governance architecture of economic surveillance. Using the multiple streams framework we argue that the new Europe 2020 strategy which emerged is a product of two overlapping policy windows which opened suddenly in the problem stream (the Greek sovereign debt crisis) and politics stream (shifting institutional dynamics). This created a window of opportunity for skilful policy entrepreneurs to ‘couple’ the three streams by reframing the existing Lisbon Strategy as the EUs exit strategy from the crisis. The article contributes to understanding policy change under conditions of ambiguity by demonstrating the causal significance of key temporal and ideational dynamics: the timing of policy windows; access to information signals; and the role of policy entrepreneurs.

Varieties of poverty reduction: Inserting the poverty and social exclusion target into Europe 2020

The aim of this article is to analyse the nature and significance of the recent European Union (EU) poverty and social exclusion target, which has become part of the EU’s new 10-year strategy, known as ‘Europe 2020’. It situates this analysis in the politics of social policy, at both transnational and national levels. The agreement on the target proved to be momentous and also contentious for the key actors involved – the Member States, the European Commission, the European Parliament – all of which were forced to change their position at some stage of the negotiations. The agreed target – to lift at least 20 million people out of poverty and social exclusion by 2020 – is ambitious and novel in an EU context. The analysis undertaken here underlines its specificity and some weaknesses. First, the target was the result of a political opportunity seized upon by a number of pro-social policy actors (some in the European Commission, the Parliament, certain Member States as well as non-governmental organizations), rather than an agreement to further Europeanize social policy. Second, the target is a compromise in that it is constituted quite diversely in terms of whether it will succeed by addressing income poverty, severe material deprivation and/or household joblessness. Third, the target allows much leeway in response by the Member States, in terms of both which definition they will use and what level of ambition they set for their target. As such, the target risks both incoherence as an approach to social policy and ineffectiveness in terms of precipitating significant action by the Member States to address poverty and social exclusion.

What are the Future Prospects for the European Social Model? An Analysis of EU Equal Opportunities and Employment Policy

The aim of our article is to examine the future prospects of the European Social Model (ESM). First, the article defines the ESM as a mixture of hard law, soft law and underlying norms and values. Second, the article analyses the ESM on a more detailed level in the case of the law of equal opportunities and employment through a historical account and the legal dynamics of integration. The results of the analysis indicate a growing integration capacity of the ESM. Yet, this runs counter to the current neoliberal preferences of the Barroso Commission which has moved from a strategy of combining economic growth and social cohesion, to one in which economic growth creates social cohesion.

A toothless bite? The effectiveness of the European Employment Strategy as a governance tool

This article concerns the effectiveness of the European Employment Strategy (EES) as a governance tool. It analyses the policy measures of the Member States with regard to the commonly agreed guidelines and the country-specific recommendations of the Council. To analyse the policy measures the paper introduces a new quantitative method, which is applied to ten EU Member States during 2005–2009. After presenting the results, the paper subsequently analyses the level of follow-up with regard to future intended reforms within the Member States and their level of responses to the country-specific recommendations. Although it is difficult to attribute the reforms within the Member States to the EES, the analysis reveals that it is hard to get Member States to move beyond their national priorities, resulting in the EES being a weak governance tool.

Central and Eastern Europe: Negotiating Influence in an Enlarged European Union

This article analyses the influence and status of the Central and Eastern European states within an enlarged European Union. It analyses two European Union policy negotiations: the Services Directive and the European Unions Financial Crisis Rescue Plan. Central to understanding the influence of a member state within negotiations are its economic size and knowledge of the Brussels policy-making apparatus. Nevertheless, as the new member states from Central and Eastern Europe have gained experience of the European Union policy negotiation process, they remain limited in their ability to influence outcomes. Therefore it can be concluded that while knowledge during negotiations is a necessary condition for successfully influencing outcome, alone it is insufficient because economic weight is particularly pertinent to those outcomes. As a result, the status of the new member states within the European Union is best described as being that of a junior partner, despite the assumed parity of Union membership.

EU enlargement, the clash of capitalisms and the European social dimension

Introduction 1. The political economy of European integration and the challenge of the 2004 and 2007 EU enlargements 2. Governance and the clash of capitalisms 3. The negotiation of the services directive 4. The negotiation of the revision of the working time directive 5. The negotiation of the Europe 2020 poverty target Conclusion Bibliography Index

The European Semester and EU Social Policy: The European Semester and EU Social Policy

Europe 2020 and the European Semester signal a major change of direction in EU social policy with new governance arrangements, policy orientations and politics. This paper analyses 290 Country Specific Recommendations and 29 interviews to answer two questions: 1) What type of social policy is being advanced by the EU at present? 2) How are EU social actors able to advance EU social policy under current conditions? It argues that the degree of progress in EU social policy in the European Semester (2011–15) has been conditional and contingent. EU social policy is more oriented to supporting market development than it is to correcting for market failures. We explain these developments by a combination of factors including the strong agency exerted by some social actors in a context of constraint, the moderation of expectations and the adoption of strategic practices by key actors, and political divisions among the Member States.

Social Europe: From ‘Add-On’ to ‘Dependence-Upon’ Economic Integration

Under its new economic reform strategy, Europe 2020, the EU has committed itself to reducing poverty and social exclusion by 20 million by 2020. Despite several decades of the EU engaging in the policy area of poverty and social exclusion, this is the first time it has set itself a quantitative target. A further encouraging aspect of this recent development is that the governance process of Europe 2020, known as the European Semester, incorporates the target. After its re-launch in 2005, the Lisbon Strategy was criticized for focusing too much on growth and jobs, and relegating the social objectives to a secondary priority or ‘add-on’ status. Both these developments suggest significant progress towards the integration into the EU of poverty and social exclusion and a deepening of social Europe.

THE EUROPEAN UNION AND THE ‘SOCIAL DEFICIT’

The aim of this article is to analyse democracy, legitimacy and interest representation within the European Union. Taking the recent rise of populist parties within the European Parliament and declining levels of public support for the European Union as a starting point, the article probes the relationship between levels of support for the European Union and the interests the European integration process represents. In doing so, it applies a political sociology approach to the EUs governance matrix to two periods: the revival of European integration from the mid-1980s up until the outbreak of the Eurozone crisis, and from 2008 onwards. It argues that the European Union has constitutionalised a system of economic governance that prioritises the objectives of liberalisation and deregulation and their actors. This sidelines more socially oriented actors and has resulted in the erosion of employment and social policy across the member states. As a result, European citizens do not believe that the European Union best serves their interests. In short, the European Union suffers from a ‘social deficit’ with respect to both the interests it represents and the policies it produces. In responding to the Eurozone crisis, the EUs policies have amplified the ‘social deficit’, thereby further narrowing interest representation in the European Union.

Governing in the Shadow of Intergovernmental Hierarchy: Delegation Failure and Executive Empowerment in the European Union

Abstract This paper develops a model of executive empowerment to explain how and why the European Council has become increasingly involved in ‘policy-setting’ and ‘policy-shaping’ decisions in the European Union (EU). Rather than being driven by intergovernmental power politics, we draw upon rational choice approaches to attribute this to three characteristics of the EUs economic reform agenda: the domestic distributional consequences; the horizontal functional interdependencies; and divergent national policy preferences. The paper suggests that these contribute to two types of delegation failure at the EU level: agenda failure (in the Commission) and negotiation failure (in the Council of Ministers). Utilising principal–agent analysis, we argue that EU-level agents have sought to overcome delegation failure by transferring functional tasks – policy initiation and decision-making – upwards to Member State principals in the European Council. We refer to this counter-intuitive process of reverse delegation as ‘Commission cultivation’ and ‘Council escalation’. These are illustrated using examples from both the Lisbon Strategy (the Services Directive) and Europe 2020 (the Europe 2020 poverty target). The paper contributes to our understanding of EU governance by reasserting the importance of intergovernmental hierarchy in securing credible political commitments at the European level.