Europeanisation, National Identities and Migration ... - europeanization

Democracy without demos 71
overtime work has been extended in favour of those with a job and at the cost
of those without a job. Collective job security has become a privilege of those
included, but has established high barriers for those who do not form part of that
collective. In the individual welfare states, the binding power and inertia of wellestablished
institutions, as well as interest coalitions of employers, employees,
employer associations and trade unions to continue with historical practice –
because of the calculability of risks, privileges, the saving of transaction costs and
avoidance of unforeseeable risks pertaining to institutional reforms, and company
blindness towards the exclusionary effects of institutionalised forms of inclusion –
have all contributed to the maintenance of welfare institutions. This has resulted
in the petrification of the society and the inability of governments to approach the
unemployment problem with fresh new strategies. The welfare state has become
a total security system for everybody with the effect of constricting the activities
of entrepreneurs in the widest sense (economical, political and moral) who are
needed for the mobilisation of society. This leads to a high rate of unemployed
people who are excluded from those networks which provide support, social status
and the feeling of self-esteem. Good economic compensation does not help to secure
social status and self-esteem.
It is in this situation of paralysis that international competition and the coordination
of employment policies in the European Union by means of ‘soft
instruments of steering’ such as monitoring and benchmarking, do not simply
restrict the range of available measures aimed at reducing unemployment rates,
but rather open up new ways of mastering that problem. In the Employment
Title of the EC Treaty, as amended by the Amsterdam Treaty of 1997, and in the
results of the Extraordinary European Council on Employment in Luxembourg
in November 1997, the member states consented to give the growth of employment
high priority (European Commission 1998). Employment policies of the member
states should be based around four pillars: (1) improving employability by training
programmes; (2) furthering job-creating entrepreneurship; (3) enhancing the adaptability
of work organisation in order to meet demands for flexibility and change;
(4) increasing equal opportunities for those who are disadvantaged. In order to
promote employment growth, a coordinated system of information on employment
statistics and different national employment strategies for reasons of monitoring
and benchmarking has been introduced. It is expected that this system should
help to identify the effects on employment of a whole set of rules and measures
applied in the different employment policies of the individual member states. From
the point of view that is committed to the ‘positive integration’ of the welfare
state, this type of ‘soft steering’ appears just like a further example of the European
Union’s limitation to ‘negative integration’ in the sense of enhancing competition
by abandoning all barriers to the free border transgressing circulation of capital,
commodities, services and labour and its refraining from positive integration in the
sense of compensating for market failure, market intervention and redistribution
with the aim of producing welfare for all and not only for those who are the winners
of market competition (Scharpf 1996). Such a position takes as an unquestioned
fact that the established welfare systems on the national level are indeed the best of