ABSTRACT
In November 1997, Europe’s leaders launched the European Employment Strategy (EES). Based on the new employment title of the Amsterdam Treaty, they hoped to emulate the success of the Maastricht convergence criteria, using similar methods of putting pressure on Member States to improve employment performance, albeit without the possibility of formal sanctions. The EES marked a double shift in employment policy: it strove to end two decades of restrictive supply policies with which European politicians had responded to the job crisis; and it was the first attempt to engage EU Member States in an internationally coordinated policy. Allan Larsson, then Director-General of Employment and Social Affairs at
the Commission, described the new European approach to unemployment as a ‘radical policy reorientation … replacing the old “wait and see” attitude – the politics of passivity – with a new active, preventive policy’ (Larsson 1998: 402). The new policy engaged European politicians in a common effort to combat long-term unemployment and increase labour market participation, reversing the many policies (more and longer benefits for older, disabled, and long-term unemployed workers; delaying the entry into the labour force or bringing forward retirement; general rounds of working-time reduction) with which many people in working age had been eased out of the labour market. In the 1990s these policies became widely seen as policy failure and, if continued, a threat to the survival of the European welfare state. This chapter analyses the multiple policy and learning effects of the new
approach. It starts, in the next section, with a brief presentation of the
background and operation of the EES and its older sister, the OECD Job Strategy. In the absence of binding sanctions, and with weak financial incentives, mutual learning and discursive diffusion, together with peer pressure, are the most plausible among the mechanisms of influence on Member States (Knill and Lehmkuhl 2002). The comparative case studies of Sweden, Denmark, the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, and France in Zeitlin and Pochet (2005) revealed four mechanisms for domestic influence: peer pressure, i.e. reputation loss through naming and shaming; socialization and discursive diffusion of the new ‘activation’ and ‘flexicurity’ discourses; mutual learning of ‘best’ or ‘good’ practices; and the strategic use of European policies as a ‘lever’ by domestic actors, for instance as a means to gain more financial resources for public employment services (Zeitlin 2005: 476-7). My focus, in this chapter is on the role of discursive diffusion and mutual learning. Section 2 outlines the theory of policy learning, diffusion and convergence, and offers three key hypotheses on the dynamics of learning and diffusion applied to employment policy. Sections 3-5 review the evidence for these hypotheses. Section 6 summarizes the chapter and draws conclusions.
