Is the Open Method of Coordination an Alternative to the Community Method?

Abstract

The Open Method of Coordination (OMC) was launched at the extraordinary European Council in March 2000 as a broadly applicable new governance instrument designed to assist the Union in achieving the ambitious goals of the Lisbon Strategy through iterative benchmarking of national progress towards common European objectives and organised mutual learning. This new method built directly on the experience of new Treaty-based processes introduced for the coordination of member state policies during the 1990s, notably the Broad Economic Policy Guidelines (BEPGs), created to coordinate macro-economic policies, and the European Employment Strategy (EES), launched in the wake of the Amsterdam Treaty.¹