INTRODUCTION

At the Lisbon European summit in 2000, the Union set itself an ambitious goal for the next decade: ‘to become the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion’. With a view to realise this socio-economic agenda, ‘a [new] open method of coordination’ (OMC) was introduced ‘as the means of spreading best practice and achieving greater convergence towards the main EU goals’. The Lisbon strategy built upon previous coordination processes in the economic (Broad Economic Policy Guidelines, 1992) and employment (European Employment Strategy, 1997) fields so that the OMC was new only to the extent that it provided a new legitimising discourse around which past and novel practices could crystallise.

Since then, the OMC has become ‘the central tool of EU social policymaking in the new millennium’, for, the social inclusion process, established in 2000 with a view ‘to make a decisive impact on the eradication of poverty’, would later be complemented by a pensions process (2001) and a health care and long-term care process (2004). As from 2006, the three processes were streamlined into a single social OMC with the following elements: