The open method of coordination and European integration: the example of European education policy

Abstract

Eight years ago, the Open Method of Coordination was codified as a mode of governance to implement the Lisbon strategy of the European Union which aims to turn the European economy into the most competitive and most dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world by 2010. Since then, the OMC has often been highlighted as a “third way” in European governance – an alternative to intergovernmental negotiations and the Classical Community Method. Hopes that the OMC could develop into a “third way” would be destroyed if the OMC had considerable potential to promote institutional- spillover and this way to encourage the European Commission's competence creep. In that case, the OMC could be seen as having a bridging function between the two traditional methods used to govern the EU. Based on the supranationalism as put forward by Sandholtz and Stone Sweet (1998), this paper analyses the OMC's potential to promote institutional-spillover in European education policy. With institutional-spillover I mean an increase of the decisional autonomy or capacity of the European Commission. The analysis reveals that the OMC's potential to promote institutional-spillover in education is very small as it neither increases participation of transnational society in the policy-making process nor sufficiently increases the autonomy of joint organisations such as the European Commission and the European Court of Justice.