Is the OMC an Alternative to the Community Method?

The Open Method of Coordination (OMC) was launched at the extraordinary European Council of March 2000 as a broadly applicable new governance instrument designed to assist the Union in achieving the ambitious goals of the Lisbon Strategy through iterative benchmarking of national progress towards common European objectives and organized mutual learning. This new method built directly on the experience of new Treaty-based processes introduced for the coordination of Member State policies during the 1990s, notably the Broad Economic Policy Guidelines (BEPGs) and the European Employment Strategy (EES).1 The OMC was defined by the Portuguese Presidency at Lisbon and afterwards as an ensemble of four interdependent procedural elements closely modeled on the EES: • ‘Fixing guidelines for the Union combined with specific timetables for achieving the goals which they set in the short, medium and long term; • establishing, where appropriate, quantitative and qualitative indicators and benchmarks against the best in the world and tailored to the needs of different Member States and sectors as a means of comparing best practices; • translating these European guidelines into national and regional policies by settin