Open method of coordination versus ?

1. Open method of coordination versus ? Robert Salais Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu BerlinCONNEX Mid-term ConferenceMannheim, MZES, 3-5 November 2005

2. Information as the basis for coordination Data (quantitative or qualitative) are not facts of nature, but social facts → Information is built up, produced and selected Reports, data, analysis, standards of evaluation, indicators, EC recommendations are the hard objects of the OMC: imposing an informational basis for social policies • A wide neglect in political science ( and probably in many others social sciences) • A market-led shift of the relevant informational basis for economic and social policies in Europe: from the unemployment rate toward the employment rate

3. Two simple examples • First example (EC): • Does the “fact” that the 2001 female employment rate in the UK (65%) is higher than in France (56%) means that the employment situation is better for women in the UK than in France? • Second example (ILO): • Does the “fact” that the percentage of trade-union membership is very low in France (compared with other countries) means that there is almost no trade-union freedom in France? • WHAT HAVE THESE EXAMPLES IN COMMON?

4. There are four problems (or confusions) at the basis of the OMC • A scientific problem: • Measurement ≠ Evaluation • Positivist belief is different from searching the truth of a given social situation • An instrumental problem: • Increasing performance ≠ Improving the situation under review • A normative problem: • Technical choice ≠ Collective search of a normative compromise • Has “optimal management” something in common with pluralism and deliberative democracy? • A methodological problem • What matters as a point of departure for relevant research? • The formal functioning of multi-level procedures as ends in themselves, • Or what effective outcomes European politics brings to European citizens with regards to their basic aspirations?

5. Transparency and comparability are not so simple • Data and information come from a production chain whose each step is a social process (meaning that it is in-depth embedded in specific national, social, material and institutional factors) (Desrosières, Thévenot, Salais). • These factors (differing from time and place) are: • indigenous categories of perception of social phenomena; • normative expectations within social groups or countries with regards to state intervention; • social questionnaires, nomenclatures and categories; • the formatting of statistics by law and welfare policies; • the manipulation of the management rules of public agencies. • To be able to draw relevant political conclusions from the OMC methodology, data and information should be adjusted in order to be based in the same institutional, legal and cognitive rules.

6. Comparing and putting into competition what is not comparable • In brief, the EC, through the OMC, compares what is not comparable. • The EC acts as if homogeneity was achieved and a unique European space created with common rules, institutions and understandings, • However this is not the case, the OMC (and all European tools) having precisely the purpose to make progress toward these truly long term objectives. • The gap between European and national categories is a reality, materially incorporated into situations, institutions, actions, expectations. Such reality cannot be eliminated. • Hence there exists a basic internal contradiction within the OMC. In my view this explains the OMC instrumentalisation by national governments and the Commission.

7. From internal contradiction to instrumentalising policies • The fact to deny the existence of this gap, as does the OMC, leads to instrumentalising policies: • Policy makers act not on market and employment realities, but directly on information concerning these realities • This is no more than strategic action applied to the functioning of monitoring tools. Far from eradicating strategic action, monitoring exacerbates it. • Policy makers progressively enter a process of rationally designing self-referring policies: • quantitatively (through optimising indicators) • or qualitatively (in selecting “good practices” and present them through their best profile). • This leads to policies and schemes that offer the best return in terms of the performances expected by the EC. • Do these policies and schemes, except occasionally or by chance, improve the situations of the people concerned? • Many examples quoted or not in Zeitlin and Pochet, 2005: the Netherlands (Visser), France (Barbier, Salais), the UK, Germany (Hartz measures?).

8. Questions for the future • In brief, the OMC seems a sophisticated version of the Rawlsian “veil of ignorance” to organise the collective choice: • Citizens are taken at distance; • Policy makers believe they are not ignorant; however they are • For they have no true knowledge about the situation and the options under choice, only preformatted and monitoring information. • Alternatives foundations for a European political method or How to implant deliberative democracy in a world of strategic actors?: • Cognitive objective: Evaluation • Political objective: Really improving the situations under review • Procedural objective: How to organise the collective search of a normative compromise and its revision (or adjustment) • Research question: How to de-construct and construct alternatives informational bases of the social situations of European citizens with regards to their basic aspirations • If so, will the OMC remain the OMC or would it be replaced by something different and to invent?

10. From the governance of heterogeneity to a politics of diversity?

11. The EES as proxy of a rational cooperative game • Benchmarking serves to politically monitor the EES and not to economically evaluate its outcomes. • Take the Commission and the member states as the players. The aim of the game is to maximise performance, based on the European tools used to measure it. Actors know in advance the formatting of future evaluation of their actions. Insofar as any learning outcome takes place, it is of a rational order and likely to affect the procedure. Cooperation consists, for each member state, in manipulating the rules of its own measures and their implementation to meet the requirements of European indicators and guidelines. It is not a collective action aimed at genuinely improving employment in Europe. • Due the limited competences given to the European level, member states are not held responsible for a substantial improvement in European employment, nor do they feel themselves accountable to such improvement when they define their employment policy actions. The only constraint is that they have agreed – and this commitment derives from the management by objectives of the OMC – to be accountable vis-à-vis the Commission with regard to their scores over the whole set of indicators. • All the EES actors (the Commission included) have – albeit for differing reasons – a political interest in arguing and publicly declaring that the EES is a valuable European achievement. Each party behaves in a manner designed to exhibit measurable progress. The behaviour in question has to be described to others (‘exchange of good practice’) and made public (this being the purpose of the Joint Annual Employment Report).

12. In other words, • To what extent is it conceivable to assimilate: A neighbourhood community aiming at collectively improve its local police (Sabel ideal-type) • And A system of national and supranational actors superlatively trained into strategic action and bargaining? Footnote: Due the limited competences given to the European level, member states are not held responsible for a substantial improvement in European employment, nor do they feel themselves accountable to such improvement when they define their employment policy actions. The only constraint is that they have agreed – and this commitment derives from the management by objectives of the OMC – to be accountable vis-à-vis the Commission with regard to their national scores over the whole set of indicators.