The impact of the EU social inclusion strategy: The czech case

Abstract

The European Union launched a new strategy to fight against poverty and social exclusion at the Lisbon summit in March 2000. It was agreed that the objectives outlined might be best achieved by the Open Method of Coordination (OMC) which has been formerly used to implement the guidelines of the European Employment Strategy since 1997. The ‘social inclusion’ agenda emerged after the summit in Nice (December 2000) when all EU member states have been obliged to elaborate and to submit to the European Commission the National Action Plans on Social Inclusion - NAPSIs (Council of the European Union, 2000a, 2000b). This agenda (understood as soft law) is based on development of common discourses, key concepts and policy principles (Radaelli, 2003; Daly, 2008) rather than on directives of hard law. The new member states which joined the EU in 2004 have been invited to elaborate on the Joint Memorandum on Social Inclusion in 2003, and since 2004 to draft the NAPSI for 2004-2006. What is completely new in the European agenda of social inclusion now being implemented in post-communist countries through OMC - when compared to the already established ‘emergency’ policies - is an explicit requirement to adopt a complex strategy and to mobilize actors and resources to address most aspects of social exclusion understood as multidimensional phenomena. At the same time, new resources to be used for that purpose are available through European structural funds. The interesting question is to what extent this agenda would facilitate both discursive and policy-making change as a mechanism of ‘path-departure’. The Czech case may serve as illustration of this since - as we will show below - the discursive and policy context there is less supportive of such a change than is the case in other CEE post-communist countries. Thus identification of any signs of ‘path-departure’ in the Czech case would support assumption about the impact of social inclusion agenda in these countries.