Abstract
For several decades it was expected that the Western-type welfare state would do away with poverty, and indeed until the 1980s this was an observable tendency in the member states of the EU. Since, however, poverty figures have been on the rise again (Kowalsky 1999: 52), and many have been speaking of “new poverty”, addressing not only income poverty but also urban decline and violence, ethnic minorities, homelessness, young unemployed, rural poverty, handicapped, single parents or elderly people. In 1975 there were estimated 38 million poor in the EU (CEC 1980). Twenty years later the number had risen to 55 million, and in 2005 the EU counted 75 million poor. Since the mid-1970s the EU addressed these “new” forms of poverty in the form of poverty programmes which, in the context of absent EU competences, attempted to promote analysis, network-building, exchange of information and mutual learning (Kröger 2007a; Rojas 1999). With such a programme approach, the Commission tried to influence national and European debates and policy development. The programmes consisted of small budgets, exchange of information, data collecting and improvement, enhancing mutual learning. They addressed a small policy community of academia, NGOs and politicians. These activities, however, came to a preliminary halt in 1996 when the United Kingdom and Germany went to the European Court of Justice to stop the implementation of a fourth programme.
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References
According to the widely used 60% median income indicator, see CEC 2006b. Of course this goes hand in hand with successive enlargement rounds.
For a critical review, see Levitas 1996 and 1998.
For a detailed account of the pros and cons of a European social policy, see Büchs 2007; Offe 2003; Scharpf 1999; Schelkle and Mabbett 2007.
“Open”, then, has been associated to the flexibility of the method which allows it to be adopted to national contexts and traditions by help of means that member states are free to choose, to openness to a variety of actors, to openness to revision at EU-level and to becoming hard law (Sundholm 2001; Télo 2001; Wincott 2001).
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(2008). Introducing the Lisbon Strategy and the OMC. In: Soft Governance in Hard Politics. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-531-91810-5_1
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