Abstract
This article offers a critical account of the ‘social’ in the Europe 2020 strategy, focusing on the new poverty target and the European Platform against Poverty and Social Exclusion. The article reaches three main conclusions. First, while poverty is given a prominent place in the strategy and the recourse to targets is intended to harden up Member State and EU coordination in the field, the poverty target is loose and risks being rendered ineffective as an EU-wide target. Secondly, the social goals and philosophy of Europe 2020 are under-elaborated. While it is important that the poverty-related measures are treated on a similar basis to the other elements of Europe 2020, it is not made clear how growth will bring about the planned reduction in poverty. ‘Inclusive growth’ has little meaning in itself. This leads to the third conclusion which is that Europe 2020 lacks a coherent model of social development. Philosophically, it draws mainly from social investment and liberal approaches, neither of which has a strong orientation to addressing poverty.
This article has two main objectives. The first is to identify the main concepts and undertakings of Europe 2020, with particular focus on the poverty-related instruments (a target, an accompanying flagship initiative – the European Platform against Poverty and Social Exclusion – and a guideline). The second objective is to consider how the philosophy and approach of Europe 2020 relate to social and welfare philosophies more broadly. This is to query the very basis of Europe 2020: whether we can identify a clear social paradigm or social philosophy in Europe 2020. A second underlying question is how the philosophy compares to known approaches to social policy, including that of the Lisbon strategy. The main evidence brought to bear on answering these questions comes from an analysis of the main documents and developments to date in Europe 2020.
What is the social content of Europe 2020?
Growth is the leading idea in ‘Europe 2020’. The nested set of ‘flagship initiatives’, targets and guidelines is centred on three goals, all of which relate to growth. As a matter of fact, it is probably more correct to say that growth is the strategy’s only goal for, in a linguistic sleight of hand, it subdivides growth into three types. ‘Smart growth’ depicts growth that hitches its wagon to improvements in educational attainment, investment in research and innovation and harnessing information and communication technologies. ‘Sustainable growth’ is conceived primarily in environmental efficiency terms but it also includes the intention to improve the business environment and help consumers make informed choices. ‘Inclusive growth’ is envisaged as growth that raises Europe’s employment rate, helps people of all ages anticipate and manage change through investment in skills and training, modernizes labour markets and welfare systems and ensures that the benefits of growth reach all parts of the EU. Skills and employment are strongly emphasized throughout. Where poverty is referred to it is the scale of Europe’s poverty and the fact that over 8 percent of European workers do not earn enough to raise themselves out of poverty that are constructed as a problem.
Targets, flagship initiatives and guidelines are the key elements of the Europe 2020 system, (although ‘system’ may not be a correct term given that their exact relationship, especially in terms of which has the leading role, is nowhere made clear). There are five areas signalled out for policy integration and reform through quantified targets: employment, spending on research and development and innovation, climate change and energy use, early school leaving and participation in tertiary education, and poverty and social inclusion. These are interpreted to refer to expenditures or rates of change in prevalence. We concentrate in this article on the poverty, employment and education measures. In the case of poverty, Europe 2020 commits to a poverty target whereby Member States will together lift some 20 million EU citizens out of poverty by 2020 (out of a total of 120 million people in such a situation). In the case of employment the target is a 75 percent employment rate and the target for education is to reduce school drop-out rates by 10 percent and to attain a minimum of a 40 percent participation rate in third-level education by 30 to 34 year olds.
There are four significant things to note at this stage about the social policy orientation of Europe 2020. The first is the prominence of poverty. Europe 2020 has not just refocused on the problem of poverty but has made poverty reduction one of its headline initiatives. We have never seen anything quite like this before. Lacking a legal competence and a strong mandate in social policy, the EU has only ever engaged with poverty in a ‘light touch’ kind of way. In the 1970s and 1980s it funded a number of poverty programmes but these mainly consisted of one-off projects at local level in Member States, designed to promote experimental work in social policy (Bauer, 2002). A second significant fact is that there is a target set for poverty, and quite an ambitious one at that – aiming to achieve a reduction of some 17 percent in the poverty prevalence across the EU by 2020. This, too, is a first for the EU. Even the Lisbon process – the EU at its most social since the Delors era during the 1980s and 1990s – avoided a prescriptive approach in its social policy objectives and so opted to put in place the innovative but loose open method of coordination (OMC), which did not aim higher than ‘coordination’ of Member State social policy in particular spheres. Third, the integrated nature of Europe 2020 is notable with poverty included in the same process as the other targets and initiatives. This is important, especially as the Lisbon strategy institutionalized a historical and structural separation in the EU between social policy and economic, monetary and employment policy. This fuelled criticism that the social dimension was an afterthought or ‘add-on’, especially in the second phase of the Lisbon strategy from 2005 on when employment and growth were made the twin overriding goals. The fear for social policy activists was that the real action went on elsewhere. The fact that in Europe 2020 poverty is included in the same framework with employment and industrial policy seems like a significant step forward. Fourth, unique among the five targets, Member States have a choice of which indicator to use for their poverty target and which level to set their target at. For, in fact, the poverty target is an income poverty, severe material deprivation and/or jobless households target and as conceived by Europe 2020 relates to either one alone of these phenomena, two, or all three. This ‘broad church’ approach reflects both the endeavours of statisticians, policy analysts and national bureaucrats over the course of the Lisbon strategy to be more precise about the measurement of poverty as well as a political ‘consensus’ that poverty has to be conceived of in diverse ways as a problem in an EU context. In responding to the target then, Member States have a choice of which of the three approaches to adopt and they may even opt for an indicator of their own choice provided they justify its usage in terms of how it will contribute to the EU target overall.
The second element of Europe 2020 is the flagship initiatives. They are generally conceived as engines for boosting growth and are in effect thematic foci for the elaboration of more specific policy issues and tools intended to support the achievement of the five EU-level targets. There are seven such initiatives – on a digital agenda, innovation, youth employment and mobility, sustainable development, industrial policy, employment and anti-poverty policies. From a social policy perspective, the most significant of these is the European Platform against Poverty and Social Exclusion. The term ‘platform’ is meant to refer to a hub or host of initiatives oriented to bringing about social and territorial cohesion. The rhetoric around the Platform emphasizes especially innovation and experimentation in social policy – ‘innovative social protection intervention’ (European Commission, 2010a: 5). The employment objectives are taken forward by an Agenda for new skills and jobs which aims at greater flexicurity, better matching of people and jobs and upgrading of skill levels, improving job quality and working conditions and improving the conditions for job creation. The education target is operationalized primarily by a flagship initiative on ‘Youth on the Move’. This promotes study abroad (educational tourism) and also aims at improving the educational and skills’ portfolios of young people as well as the functioning of education and training systems.
The third element of the Europe 2020 strategy are the 10 integrated guidelines. Six of these are on economic policy and four relate to employment policy. The latter include a guideline on poverty and social exclusion (Guideline 10) which refers to ‘promoting social inclusion and combating poverty, clearly supporting income security for vulnerable groups, social economy, social innovation, gender equality, and the poverty headline target.’ The other three employment guidelines relate to increasing labour market participation and reducing structural unemployment, developing a skilled workforce, and improving the performance of education and training systems and increasing tertiary education participation.
Before we can assess what to make of this configuration we need to explore the substance of the different elements in greater detail.
The substantive social policy measures
The stated aims and activities of the European Platform against Poverty and Social Exclusion are especially important from a substantive social policy sense since they spell out the details of the measures and actions that are envisaged. The Platform aims to: address the needs of groups particularly at risk, tackle severe exclusion and new vulnerabilities; break the cycle of disadvantage and step up prevention efforts; and function better and more efficiently in times of budget constraints. Five areas of action have been identified (European Commission, 2010a, 2010b). These are:
Delivering action to fight against poverty and social exclusion across the policy spectrum;
Making EU funds deliver on the social inclusion and social cohesion objectives;
Promoting evidence-based social innovation;
Promoting a partnership approach and the social economy;
Stepping up policy coordination between the Member States.
In terms of policy substance, the elaboration of the first aim – delivering action to fight poverty and social exclusion across the policy spectrum – is among the most revealing. The dominant set of references here is to employment, whether through the Agenda for new skills and jobs (one of the other flagship initiatives) or active inclusion (whereby benefit systems are reformed to frontline their incentives and functions around employment participation). Access to essential services is a second theme highlighted by the Platform. The discussion here is pitched mainly in terms of the need for greater efficiency (through service consolidation, better delivery and the mobilization of a wider set of actors and instruments). Even classic social policy issues like health inequalities are framed as a challenge to improve service efficiency. A third focus is on education and training. Here the proposals are infused by a sense of ‘inclusion’ with emphasis on addressing early school leaving and more effective interventions at all levels of education to counter disadvantage and child poverty. Migration and in particular the integration of migrants is a fourth emphasis, with a New European Agenda on Integration produced in July 2011 (European Commission, 2011). A fifth emphasis is on discrimination and social inclusion – this is actually a ‘catch-all’ heading housing under one ‘roof’ gender inequality, people with disabilities, those suffering mental ill-health, Roma and the homeless. Among the most significant planned actions – in terms of status and authority within the EU system – listed for the European Platform against Poverty and Social Exclusion are a Recommendation on child poverty, a Communication on and proposals for a Council Recommendation on early school leaving, a Communication on active inclusion and on early childhood education and care, and a White Paper on Pensions (European Commission, 2010b).
It is noticeable how oriented the Platform is to process and the better use of existing resources and instruments. In comparison to the Lisbon strategy, the Platform has a particular social policy remit in several respects. First, the intention is to mainstream poverty and social inclusion (especially articulated through the first and fifth sets of actions). This seeks to address a gap that yawned wide and was never bridged during the Lisbon strategy, between social policy and other policy domains. This gap was especially large in the second phase of Lisbon (from 2005 on) where the price paid for the survival of the social process was that it was hived off into its own open method of coordination. 2 Europe 2020 has made poverty and social inclusion part of the formal policy process. A key change within the governance architecture has made for the simultaneous reporting of the Convergence Programmes of the Member States (for the Stability and Growth Pact) with the National Reform Programmes (which includes poverty and social exclusion related matters). A second way in which the Platform is different as compared with the Lisbon strategy is that it has a broader range of instruments and especially financial instruments (as expressed in the commitment to use the Structural Funds to support poverty reduction).
However three notes of caution have to be sounded in regard to claims about the importance attributed to social policy in Europe 2020 as compared to the Lisbon strategy. First, social policy considerations are not mainstreamed into other funding instruments apart from the Structural Funds. Secondly, the use of the funding mechanisms and indeed the entire Europe 2020 compact we now know to be subject to the various fiscal and macroeconomic pacts which have emerged to deal with the euro crisis and this will serve to downgrade the commitment to poverty and other social objectives. It appears that Europe 2020 is not the main driver of EU developments and has itself been sidelined by the fiscal pacts. But even within Europe 2020 there is a strong emphasis on correcting financial and other imbalances (i.e. budget deficits and ‘unmodern’ social security and labour market arrangements) and all policy areas are subject to these priorities. A third reservation relates to the adequacy of governance arrangements for social policy. Europe 2020 rests on the hope that a ‘joined-up’ process (which is to be realized by ‘integrated’ guidelines and integrated reporting for the European Semester) will lead to the upgrading of social policy and increase the chances of it being part of an integrated approach. But whether this is sufficient to bring social policy in from the sidelines is questionable. There is also the matter of what happens to the governance acquis that was built up under Lisbon. Armstrong (this issue) depicts the social OMC as having been ‘orphaned’ in the Europe 2020 agenda. Although known to have weaknesses, the social OMC contributed to benchmarking social policy at EU level, enhancing stakeholder participation in the social policy process and reinforcing mutual learning and policy coordination among Member States (Zeitlin, 2010). To sideline or ‘orphan’ it then is to undo important groundwork (either in processes, learning and/or politics). It now appears that it is to be continued in a lighter touch way – with the EPSCO Council of June 2011 endorsing a role for a leaner OMC, including strategic reporting towards the common objectives on social protection and social inclusion (Council of the European Union, 2011).
Social policy, of course, ranges more widely in Europe 2020 than the poverty-related measures however. The Agenda for new skills and jobs as well as the Youth on the Move initiative are both relevant social policy contributions. Flexibility and deregulation figure prominently in the former. There is also reference to social security reform especially in relation to unemployment benefit coverage and pensions. The suggestion is made to reform unemployment benefit systems to render their level and coverage easier to adjust over the business cycle (i.e. offer more resources in bad times and fewer in good times) and to improve benefit coverage for those most at risk of unemployment, such as fixed-term workers, young people in their first jobs and the self-employed. These are both quite radical proposals, although they remain within a general frame of individualizing social security entitlement, especially in the suggestion that the level of unemployment benefits should be commensurate to the individual work history. The Youth on the Move initiative gives a lot of attention to individual young people. The intention especially is to increase young people’s take-up of existing facilities and opportunities to improve their qualifications. Transition and movement are the leitmotif here with young people depicted as travellers and consumers of migratory and other forms of mobility.
What kind of philosophy underlies Europe 2020?
As a first step, it is helpful to identify its key values. On my reading, these are: growth, efficiency, reform/modernization. How are these articulated? Europe 2020’s first (and second and third) principle is growth. Moreover, it is growth for its own sake. Despite the adjectival innovations, Europe 2020 sticks very closely to a growth paradigm whereby continued expansion of production and consumption is seen to lead to both economic stability and increases in welfare or well-being. ‘Smart growth’ and ‘sustainable growth’ are considered as enablers – policy that invests in education and human capacity and does so in a way that is oriented to environmental protection is the favoured means of achieving smart and sustainable growth. It is notable that in these types growth is the agent whereas the third type of growth – inclusive growth – tends to be defined by its consequences. But how exactly the reduction of poverty is to be effected by smart and sustainable growth is nowhere spelt out. Nor is it made clear how growth creates inclusion for example or gets rid of discrimination. I find it hard to see ‘inclusive growth’ as more than a descriptive and aspirational term.
Efficiency (or rather inefficiency) is centripetal to the problem diagnosis in Europe 2020. Resource efficiency is elevated by Europe 2020 into a core value. The European Platform against Poverty and Social Exclusion, for example, places strong emphasis on better coordinating the different EU financial instruments to deliver on the social inclusion and social cohesion objectives. Also significant in this respect is the proposal that the new Cohesion Policy post-2013 have a Common Strategic Framework that will ensure coherence and complementarity between the European Regional Development Fund, the European Social Fund, the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development and the European Fisheries Fund. While there is no doubt but that there is much to be gained from better use of resources and instruments, it is difficult to see this as a sufficient strategy to combat poverty. While everybody benefits from better organized and more efficient services and funding instruments, these alone or together with policies oriented towards growth will not end poverty or social exclusion. Policies prioritizing adequate minimum income protection and the reinforcement of the redistributive capacity of social programmes are critical elements of an anti-poverty strategy (Cantillon, 2011).
This point can be applied also to another core value in Europe 2020: reform. A discourse of reform and modernization runs strongly throughout Europe 2020, in particular reform of the welfare institutions. The underlying analysis (assumption actually) is that growth is elusive because Europe has not attended sufficiently to reforming its welfare-related practices and architecture. A recent Social Protection Committee (2011a: 15) report carries this idea forward. It concludes that: ‘The first analysis of the provisional NRPs [National Reform Programmes] tends to indicate that Member States are not giving enough priority to the modernization of social assistance and income support mechanisms, and to the role of coordination of social services, including integration services, with employment services in the implementation of active inclusion strategies.’ Europe 2020 is permeated by reform as a value in its own right. Modernization – interpreted in terms of loosening regulation and orienting the capacity and functioning of the welfare institutions and the people who avail themselves of them towards dynamism and flexibility – is the preferred form of reform. This continues a philosophical and managerialist trend established under the Lisbon strategy and even earlier (Jepsen and Serrano-Pascual, 2005: 237). The role of the welfare state is to promote the management of risk rather than to protect people against risk. The EU sees its social policy as a means of optimizing the adjustment of social protection systems to market forces (Jepsen and Serrano-Pascual, 2005: 238). The term flexicurity – one of the favoured policy approaches of both the Lisbon strategy and the EU Commissioner for Employment, Social Affairs and Equal Opportunities 3 (Vladimír Špidla) who presided over it – is deployed to pick up the notion of matching the opposing goals of security and flexibility. 4
The relationship between the values of Europe 2020 and known philosophies
It has to be said at the outset that welfare is being recast in Europe and elsewhere, so much so that the classic philosophies are no longer a safe or reliable guide to what is happening. It used to be the case that one could differentiate philosophies of welfare on the basis of where they fell on the political/intervention spectrum, with the distinction between social-democratic and liberal approaches especially useful (Daly, 2011). That is no longer the case, not least because liberalism is becoming much more elaborated and differentiated, with many adaptations and iterations (Crouch, 2011), and social democracy is far less prominent and confident than it used to be. The EU has never followed a redistributionist, social solidarity social policy. In recent years (under the Lisbon strategy for example), it has teetered between Third Way and liberal approaches. The Lisbon strategy, especially in its early years, showed creativity in developing an approach that sought simultaneously to promote sustainable economic growth and social cohesion (Jepsen and Serrano-Pascual, 2005). The first phase of Lisbon therefore emphasized access to rights, goods and services as well as opportunities for employment. But this did not last much beyond the first four years and was actually dropped before it was even fully articulated as a programme for policy. The second phase of the Lisbon strategy – from 2005 on – was more liberal in orientation, focused primarily on jobs and economic growth as a means of addressing poverty and social exclusion. While the EU’s legal mandate for social policy has been expanded somewhat with the coming into force of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, the Union still takes a cautious and in many respects politically conservative approach to social policy. This leaves it with at best a mixed philosophical approach, at worst a confused and inoperable one.
The poverty target is a case in point. While ambitious – aiming for a reduction of 17 percent in the proportion of people in poverty – the poverty target tries to sidestep contentious issues in two ways: by widening the meaning of poverty to include three different dimensions, and allowing Member States a relatively free choice about which indicator or focus of poverty to adopt.
In terms of the three-part composition of the poverty target, it certainly does not draw from an anti-poverty philosophy in any simplistic or coherent fashion. As mentioned, it is comprised of three dimensions or elements (from which Member States can select their preferred focus): income poverty, severe material deprivation and joblessness. The first – being below a 60 percent cut-off of median income – is the classic relative poverty measure based on how one’s income compares to the societal average. The second component of the target – being without at least four items out of a nine-item list of ‘deprivations’ 5 – is meant to pick up on lifestyle deprivation and access to customary standards and styles of living. The third dimension links into household joblessness – the number of people in a household where the adults worked less than 20 percent of their total work-time potential during the reference period. Two concerns underlie this: work intensity on the part of individuals sharing the same household or family; the psychological predispositions around employment and the morally corrosive effects of joblessness, especially in an intergenerational sense.
There is no coherent philosophy that unites all of these; in fact each draws from different perspectives and calls for different responses. Income poverty highlights the degree to which people have adequate financial resources and as an approach to social policy calls for either income redistribution (if poverty is seen as relative income level) or the guaranteeing of a basic or minimum income threshold below which no one should fall (if an absolute approach is taken). The EU has never settled on relative income poverty as a definition of poverty – it has been contested as a true indicator of poverty by different Member States at different points in time and the redistributionist social policy model implied by a relative poverty approach has had limited appeal or support at EU level (although there were moments – in the Delors years for example and also in the early phase of Lisbon – when this approach was more accepted). A glance through the measures outlined for the Platform against Poverty and Social Exclusion confirms that Europe 2020 has no vision of addressing poverty by redistributive measures. The second element of the poverty target – deprivation – genuflects in the direction of societal standards of living and the multi-dimensional nature of poverty and social exclusion. It is also meant to address one of the weaknesses of the relative income poverty threshold which is that it does not give sufficient weight to improving or disimproving living standards, especially in countries where living and income standards are low (De Graaf-Zijl and Nolan, 2011: 425). As a policy response, adequate income is important here, too, but so also are social services and measures to combat social exclusion. One of the achievements of the Lisbon years was to make a place for social exclusion within the EU social policy portfolio (Daly, 2010). In regard to its definition and its measurement, social exclusion has survived into Europe 2020 (albeit in the form of severe deprivation) but hardly at all in terms of substantive policy measures. Hence, while services are highlighted for action in Europe 2020, as already mentioned the slant taken on them is in terms of improving their efficiency and their openness to deal with vulnerable sectors of the population as against quality public service as a hallmark of a just and deprivation-free society. The third element or constituent of the target – jobless households – does not problematize unemployment per se but rather its distribution or concentration among people living in the same household or family. The perceived solution is to intervene in what is viewed especially as a family or intergenerational cycle whereby people become demotivated, and disadvantage and poor access to the labour market become more entrenched as time passes and generations succeed each other. There are three required policy actions involved: to make more jobs available; to target these jobs towards people sharing households where there is too little engagement with employment; and to make people in these households available for employment and wanting to be employed. All the indications are that this is here as a compromise to those Member States which prioritize employment over social protection as a response to poverty. Its inclusion creates measurement difficulties though (Eurostat, 2010). And there is also the fact that it stems not just from a different philosophy than the other two indicators but that as an empirical phenomenon there is little association between the overall extent of household joblessness in a country and the percentage in relative income poverty or materially deprived (de Graaf-Zijl and Nolan, 2011; Copeland and Daly, 2012). Hence, measures to address household joblessness will not contribute hugely to reducing poverty and material deprivation and vice versa. An important point to note in all of this – and one which is often forgotten in the technical debate about measurement and indicators – is that income poverty, severe deprivation and joblessness are real-life phenomena, affecting individuals and families and presenting communities and societies with real problems which are often layers deep.
There is a second set of problems with the target also. I believe that the mathematical union (i.e. an ‘and/or’ combination) of three broad problem areas identified by three indicators is misguided. To be sure, there are some justifications for opening up the target – for example the extent of the three (and other) problems vary across Member States and so some leeway is advised. However looked at from the perspective of EU social policy, it leaves too many policy options, including less relevant ones, open to Member States and risks incoherence as a global target. The latest information on the actual targets chosen by Member States indicates that some countries have exercised the choice implicit in the target. In particular, the UK has chosen child poverty for its target; Sweden has opted for the number of women and men not in the labour force, the long-term unemployed and those on long-term sick leave; Denmark has selected households with low work intensity; Germany has chosen long-term unemployment rates. And as of January 2012, Luxembourg had not set any target. 6 Even at this early stage of the process then, it is obvious that there is a considerable degree of variability in the poverty target. This makes for at least two difficulties. First, the comparability of responses across countries is rendered difficult if countries are targeting different fields/problems. Secondly, it is difficult to monitor and compare national achievements and also to coordinate each country’s contribution towards the overall EU target.
Conclusions about Europe 2020’s social philosophy
One has to resist pinning a single philosophical label to Europe 2020. In truth, it is philosophically inchoate. It mixes a number of approaches but is shot through especially by ideas drawn from social investment and liberalism.
The social investment perspective is an approach which is receiving more and more attention, not just from policy-makers but also academic and other analysts trying to piece together a reform scenario that is social democratic in orientation. It is a compromise position, accepting of both the globalized form of contemporary capitalism and the reform capacity of both the (welfare) state and the market. Essentially, it broadens the notion of social policy as a productive factor beyond its traditional emphasis on social protection, extending it to encompass public interventions oriented to social promotion (by investing to improve the quality of education and training, human capital and people’s resourcefulness more generally). Redistribution takes on a much more active cast in this model of the welfare state, especially as redistribution towards the active and the young (Jenson, 2009). In practice, it is probably best summarized as an approach that seeks to ‘prepare’ individuals, families and societies to adapt to various transformations, such as changing career patterns and working conditions, the emergence of new social risks, population ageing and climate change, rather than on simply generating responses aimed at ‘repairing’ any damage caused by market failure, social misfortune, poor health or prevailing policy inadequacies’ (Vandenbroucke et al., 2011). The social investment approach takes it for granted that the welfare state has to change; the depiction in the above quote of the classic social-democratic welfare state as passive (in itself and in terms of its consequences in generating dependency) leaves little room other than for a welfare state that not just leads change but is itself the epitome of a modernized and dynamic institution. It differs from liberalism especially in the adoption of a positive approach to and theory of the welfare state but it shares with neoliberalism a belief in a strong role for the market in delivering welfare. 7
The discerning reader will already have seen echoes of a social investment approach in the content of Europe 2020 as outlined. These include:
a focus on social services and their quality and functioning;
the importance attributed to education (lifelong) and mobility and life chances for young people and children;
the importance attributed to labour market reform from a supply-side perspective especially, including training measures, individualized counselling and child care provision;
the focus on active labour market programmes and incentivization through retrenched welfare benefits of shorter duration and increased targeting and sanctioning.
Europe 2020 does not fully embrace a social investment approach, however, and where it does it leaves vital linkages under-developed. The European Anti-Poverty Network (2009) is in my view correct to critique it for not recognizing sufficiently the importance of social security, social protection or social services. They are not right that there is no critique of the existing system implied by the poverty target – there is but as I have said it is one confined more or less to system inefficiency. This brings us to the liberal emphases of Europe 2020 which are to be found in its policy focus and also its ‘hierarchy’ of goals. In its policy content it cleaves to the growth and market-first model definitive of liberalism – it underplays social rights, quality job creation or a broad-ranging social programme. The main solution to poverty and social exclusion is involvement in a less regulated, poorer quality labour market. In this light, the poverty initiatives of Europe 2020 smack of minimalism, a basic floor or threshold that has to be protected in the context of far-reaching welfare state cutbacks and reforms. The EU reform programme has liberal overtones also in terms of the way that Europe 2020 is subordinated to the economic governance measures. This tends to give the lie to Europe 2020’s claim of mainstreaming poverty and employment objectives. It seems more correct to say that under Europe 2020 poverty and employment (and the other areas of attention) have been integrated together into a second stream. Having had one year of Europe 2020 and seen two Annual Growth Survey reports, it is now clear that macroeconomic stability and sound public finances are at the centre of the EU. In other words, developments within the five headline targets are dependent upon the public finances of the Member States (EAPN, 2011).
Europe 2020 is fundamentally revealing about the lack of consensus around poverty and social exclusion in Europe. Some see these as labour-market related problems – that employment is not promoted sufficiently as an alternative to social protection and that there is too little engagement with paid work on the part of some sectors of the population; others view them in financial and relative income terms; whereas for others they are a matter of the standard of living that people can achieve relative to a societal average. While there is no doubt that the Member States vary in terms of the extent to which they are faced with each of these phenomena, there is no doubt either that addressing poverty does not command wide consensus in the EU at the present time.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.