Changing European Employment and Welfare Regimes: The Influence of the Open Method of Coordination on National Reforms by Martin Heidenreich & Jonathan Zeitlin

Author:Martin Heidenreich & Jonathan Zeitlin [Heidenreich, Martin & Zeitlin, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Business & Economics, Labor, General, Political Science, International Relations, Public Policy, Economic Policy, Social Policy
ISBN: 9781134015443
Google: -wx6AgAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 17474355
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2009-05-07T00:00:00+00:00

Of course they are kind of reporting documents for the Commission, but at the same time they still form a basis for all the other activities and programmes. It is usually required that if you want to develop some kind of project you must point out how it is connected to the priorities set out in the national policy and also in the JAP.

(Interview, Ministry of Finance, Estonia, 2004)

It should also be emphasized that the problems mentioned—the NAPs as reports for Brussels with little policy relevance domestically and the isolated groups of civil servants working with EU topics—are not unique to the new Member States, but also been identified in the implementation of the EES in the EU-15 (Jacobsson and Vifell 2007). It even seems that the post-accession NAPs are actually better integrated into national policy in the Baltics than they were in the EU-15. This is also the view of the European Commission: ‘[the NAPs] receive a higher profile in many of the new Member States where they tend to be more forward-looking and play a central role in the policy cycle’ (CEC 2005: 12). Pisani-Ferry and Sapir (2006) also conclude that the new Member States have more ‘ownership’ of the Lisbon process than do the EU-15.

However, one can also question the European Commission’s ability to evaluate the reality behind the NAPs or NRPs. For instance, the Estonian NAP of 2004 was drafted over the summer by one individual who had just begun working at the ministry. The input by other ministries and the social partners was minimal, due to both the narrow time frame and the summer holidays. The Commission nonetheless gave Estonia almost nothing but positive feedback. Although there was a much wider involvement in the production of the NPR in 2005, it is still surprising that Pisani-Ferry and Sapir (2006) ranked Estonia number one of all the EU-25 on their ‘ownership index’ of the Lisbon process. It leaves us with the impression that Estonia is better at ‘image management’ than, for instance, Lithuania, which has had the reputation of being a ‘laggard’ (Granqvist and Wallin 2007), but which in our view took the production of NAPs more seriously than Estonia. This can also be compared to the experience in other post-socialist countries. A representative from the Hungarian foreign ministry, for instance, spoke at a conference about ‘hiding’ their first NAP from the EU Commission, due to its poor quality and the fact that it had been given such little attention (Author’s observation, 2004).

The EU’s reluctance to push Estonia and Latvia regarding the social and labour market situation of their Russian minorities is also worth commenting upon. This is a policy-relevant problem that seems to have been avoided in both the country-specific recommendations and the peer reviews exerted by other Member States in the Employment Committee. When minority issues have been brought up it has been about the Roma instead:

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