The sociogenesis of the nation- state in European social policy

Abstract

Introduction In this chapter, a world culture perspective is applied to alternative forms of governance within the EU. In contrast to the widely held view in governance research that the Open Method of Coordination (OMC) constitutes a more or less successful arrangement for policy learning, I propose the hypothesis that mechanisms of “soft” governance (Trubek and Trubek, 2003) are both means and results of the diffusion (by transposition) of a global culture. The OMC surrounds EU member states with a complex array of expectations that constitute a framework for legitimate action. Ultimately, the member states’ adoption of the OMC leads to a reconstitution of the idea of who an actor is and what an actor does. The European Commission, researchers, and International Non-Governmental Organizations (INGOs) play a decisive part in this process of actor formation by taking on the role of “cultural others” (Bernhard and Munch, 2011; Meyer, 1996). Their work can be understood in reference to the work of George H. Mead as a contribution to the sociogenesis of the nation-state in a European community. These cultural others contribute to the dissemination of scripts, which can be defined by three key elements: first, the EU member states are expected to behave as actors that learn strategically and formulate policy prospectively in a learning-based manner. Second, the coordination of national social policies offers transnational actors diverse and lasting opportunities to act as cultural others and thereby contribute to the new selfunderstanding of the member states. Third, through the process of OMC, central terms and concepts are established as legitimizing European frames of reference that allow for coordination in the form of a “standardization of differences.” (Schwinn, 2006) The actual impact of these scripts in national contexts depends on complex processes of domestication that can be analyzed with Bourdieu’s concept of fields (Bourdieu, 1977; Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992). All in all, the world culture perspective and governance research thus share the view that OMC is a process of diffusion, but according to the world culture perspective advocated here diffusion is not primarily of instrumental policy-making knowledge but rather of “existential knowledge” (Buttner, 2012). The contribution has three sections. The following section introduces the neoinstitutional idea of actorhood with an emphasis on the role of cultural othersin the process of becoming a legitimate actor. The next section turns to the empirical object of investigation, the OMC in EU social and employment policies. It elaborates the world cultural script of good European nationhood and shows how the OMC as a learning procedure serves as a structural base for the diffusion of this script. The section also argues that the domestication of this script depends on the dynamic of power struggles in national fields. Finally, in the last section the core assertions of the world culture perspective are summarized with a view to explaining processes of domestication.