This book investigates to what extent and how the European Semester impacts on national employment policy in four EU member states of the Central and Eastern European (CEE) region. Using an original theoretical and methodological framework, and based on empirical evidence from extensive interviews with experts in the field, this book examines the relation between EU preferences, exemplified by the yearly list of country-specific recommendations, and national policy responses to EU suggestions, tracing the extent to which policy change can be attributed to the influence of the European Semester. It extracts three potential mechanisms of European Semester influence on policy change: External pressure, mutual learning and creative appropriation and identifies key contributing and inhibiting factors. The book provides several policy recommendations regarding the organisation and workings of the European Semester process. This text will be of key interest to students, academics and practitioners in European and EU politics, EU socio-economic governance, EU social policy, European integration, soft Europeanization and the Europeanization of Central and Eastern Europe.

This book is the first to be dedicated entirely to the European Semester -- a new framework for policy coordination across European Union (EU) member states. The Semester represents a major advancement in EU governance. Created in 2010 in the wake of the financial and sovereign debt crises and revamped in 2015, it was intended to provide a new socio-economic governance architecture to coordinate national policies without transferring legal sovereignty to EU level. The papers in this collection are written by authors who have already contributed to this literature and have conducted original research for their studies. The book offers an empirical and theoretical assessment of the European Semester, examining its implications along three critical axes, running respectively between the economic and the social, the supranational and the intergovernmental, and the technocratic and democratic poles of EU governance. The book concludes that the European Semester challenges established theoretical understandings of EU governance, as it is a prime example of the complexity that supersedes simple polar oppositions. The chapters were originally published in a special issue of the Journal of European Public Policy.

An original new textbook providing an up-to-date, critical perspective of how the EU works, and what issues it faces, in the post-crisis era.

'Undeniably Good Governance in Central and Eastern Europe provides many insights in the political economy of institutional reform and constitutes an important contribution to the growing literature on "second-generation" reforms.' - Carlos Santiso, Democratization The implementation of a democratic order embedded in a market economy environment has proved immensely difficult. Furthermore, this process is subject to tremendous variety within Central and Eastern Europe. Ten years after the collapse of communism it was apparent that only Poland and Slovenia surpassed their 1989 levels of GDP. This book scrutinises the arrangements to enforce good governance in this area both by means of external help and domestic political leadership. From the popular assumption that transformation is a collective good, it follows that the problem of free-riding has to be faced. Consequently there is a danger that transformation may never be completed. This book empirically tests the relationship between economic performance and good governance focusing upon voluntary coercion as a means to prevent free-riding behaviour. The author examines the role of international organisations and discusses elite formation as an important element of good governance - something often ignored in the economic analysis of economic performance.

Seminar paper from the year 2013 in the subject Politics - Topic: European Union, grade: A- bzw. 1,7, Central European University Budapest (Department of Public Policy), course: EU Socio-Economic Governance, language: English, abstract: In the mid-1990s, welfare states in Europe were under acute strain. Unemployment had risen dramatically (Trubek/Mosher 2001, 6) and in 1997, 18 per cent of the population of the European Union (EU) lived in a household below the relative income poverty threshold (Armstrong 2010, 1). Although social policies were traditionally tasks of the nation-states, an increasing “Europeanization” of “social exclusion” and the inability of the member states to act in an increasing multi-level governance context led to the need for actions on a European level (Armstrong 2010, 2). The start was made with the “European Employment Strategy” (EES) (Trubek/Mosher 2001, 6), which became, due to its success, (Trubek/Trubek 2005, 349-351) the forerunner of the “Open Method of Coordination” (OMC) (Sabel/Zeitlin 2008, 289). The OMC, like the EES, is an Instrument of governance in the EU, which is based on voluntary cooperation and rests on soft law mechanism (Borrás/Jacobsson 2004, 189). Armstrong describes the function of the OMC in his Book about European policy coordination as follows: “The function of the OMC is not to make policy itself but rather to provide a framework within which states are encouraged to identify policy problems and to seek solutions either within their own domestic systems or by learning from the experience of others” (Armstrong 2010, 9). The reason for this soft law solution was the lack of political support for further transfers of legal competencies to the EU in social areas (Borrás/Jacobsson 2004, 190). But precisely because of this soft law nature, many critics accuse that the OMC is ineffective and even dangerous for further European integration (Trubek/Trubek 2005, 344, 351, 355).

The integration of post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe into the EU is one of the success stories of European development. The region has seen significant economic convergence, dramatic changes in socio-economic indicators and improvements in the natural environment. However, some challenges remain, such as political divergence, public governance issues and population demographics. This book identifies and analyses the key post-1990 developments across the New Member States at the sub-national and national levels, with frequent country-level and regional comparisons. Careful attention is paid to drawing out commonalities in development trajectories while appreciating each country’s unique context. Drawing on the academic literature and illuminating empirical material, the broad range of topics discussed in the book paints a detailed picture of both change and stability in Central and Eastern Europe. It will be valuable reading for advanced students, researchers and policymakers in regional studies, European studies, human geography, political economy and transition economics.

Within the framework of the new European economic governance, neoliberal views on wages have further increased in prominence and have steered various reforms of collective bargaining rules and practices. As the crisis in Europe came to be largely interpreted as a crisis of competitiveness, wages were seen as the core adjustment variable for ‘internal devaluation’, the claim being that competitiveness could be restored through a reduction of labour costs. This book proposes an alternative view according to which wage developments need to be strengthened through a Europe-wide coordinated reconstruction of collective bargaining as a precondition for more sustainable and more inclusive growth in Europe. It contains major research findings from the CAWIE2 – Collectively Agreed Wages in Europe – project, conducted in 2014–2015 for the purpose of discussing and debating the currently dominant policy perspectives on collectively-bargained wage systems under the new European economic governance.