"The Open Method of Coordination and the European welfare state"

Open Method Coordination (OMC) has been treated in the literature as the Lazarus of the European integration. Developed at the Lisbon Summit, it has led to the reincarnation of the European Union, both in terms of what it does and how it does it. No longer is the European Union to be centred around the Classic Community Method (CCM) of supranational management of regulation. Instead, it is to be a decentred participatory process in which national governments are on longer controlled and commanded by the imperatives of EC law, but rather commit themselves to review each other's programmes in the light of a series of mutually agreed standards and of domestic and transnational participatory processes. The European Council and its surrounding machinery is placed at the heart of the Union's policy process, and new types of Union-member state relations are forged, which are centred less around classical legal prescriptions, and more around diffuse national adaptation to a wide army of transnational norms, whose form and origin varies. This article will argue, however, that there is a danger in comparing these methods at the level of constitutional abstraction. Each is both a method of governance and a policy process. Neither can be separated from the policy remit they govern