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Lendvai N.
A DISCURSIVE TIME-TRAVEL?
EU ACCESSION AND THE PROFOUND TRANSFORMATION OF POST COMMUNIST SOCIAL POLICY
Introduction
The EU has landed on a very unique and particular landscape when it arrived to post-communist countries. EU Accession is a unique meeting point and a dialogue between the two distinct constructions: EU supranational and post-communist social policy. It is a reflexive process which acts like a mirror: it highlights fundamental capacities and incapacities, institutional features, conceptual frameworks and political constructions. For the candidate countries, EU Accession is essentially a linguistic and conceptual mapping, referred to as a ‘new dictionary’, and a ‘different worldview’. It is a meaning-making process whereby new member states comply with new European concepts, policy frameworks and adopt social values, new institutions and new discourses. It is therefore both a soft, learning process and a hard political project - not least because the ‘indigenisation’ of new societal ideas and concepts, a process of gaining full ownership over these new societal concepts, are developing in a very specific socio-political context and rigid institutional framework, making it an indeed political project: a vulnerable and strongly discursive time travel.
The paper is divided into two parts. The first part introduces some theoretical concepts, and argues that EU Accession could be seen as a meaning-making process, as well as a translation exercise not in linguistic, but in social and political sense. The second part of the paper offers some dimensions of the ‘time-travel’, a core concept developed here, with examples from inscribed social policy such as the JIMs (Joint Inclusion Memoranda) of the eight new post-communist member states, and some of the NAPs/inclusion (National Action Plan for social inclusion) as well as examples based on my interviews with the epistemic community around social policy in the context of EU Accession in Hungary, Croatia and Slovenia.
Translation, meaning-making and ‘time leap’: comments on the nature of dialogue between EU and post-communist social policy
For the new member states, which have developed and acquired a specific historical path of welfare state development and as a result developed its own welfare language, EU is indeed a new location of meaning, a new ‘worldview’, a process of translation. EU, and its social policy, with all its claims, concepts, terms, and policy framework are far from obvious for the new member states, and therefore from a post-communist standpoint EU social policy is not something to be taken for granted. Terms such as social inclusion, cohesion, mainstreaming, streamlining, activation, flexicurity are the results of decades of political, economic and welfare state development in Western part of Europe (Szalai, 2002). As a result, these terms, as the whole conceptual framework of EU social policy, are highly novel for the post-communist countries, not only because they have not been part of the same welfare state development, but also because they have not been part of decades of EU integration either. The new member states became members of the EU without a full ownership over the values, objectives and achievements of EU. The new member states are taking on board, adopting, ‘translating’ the EU common objectives, which was developed by EU-15, - let it be relevant or not, crucial or not in the post-communist Europe - putting the newcomers in a passive role of ‘policy-takers’ (a phrase by Fink-Hafner and Lajh, 2003) without ownership over EU goals (of which they have very little knowledge and context).
Krémer (2004) in a similar vein, describes EU social policy as a ’neology’ and as a ’neutralised language umbrella’, developed by ‘eurocrats’ in order to be able to reach a wide consensus among diverse stakeholders. This neological ‘face’ of the EU social policy is a crucially relevant feature of the formation of a supranational social policy from the standpoint of the new Member States, not least because it is key for the claim-making processes that take place within the EU. If that is the case, EU Accession, the European integration, or Europeanisation could be seen as a translation process, by which the new member states start to develop common understanding, and thereby some ownership over EU social policy. However, translation is not a straight forward process as is the case of Hungary.
As scholars of the sociology of translation point out translation is not only a technical nor only a linguistic matter - it is a deeply inscribed political and societal process. The sociology of translation is looking at particular ways in which objects, knowledge and facts are produced through displacement or suppression of dissenting voices, or of those “facts unfit to fit” (Gebhardt, 1982:405) Translation in this context is a displacement, with implications of difficulties in indigenisation of EU frameworks. As a ministry advisor in Hungary told me,“Categories are existentially determined, they are forms of living, and before we have them in our heads they are already out in reality, if someone has no idea about sphericality, cannot think about the balls. The same applies to EU terms and concepts”.
Similarly to the concept of displacement, dissociation is a term which was already elaborated by institutionalist scholars like Stark and Bruszt (2002) referring to the adoption of acquis communitaire as a dissociation of rules and regulations, where these are not organically produced and deliberated, but simply shipped over into a new, unfamiliar regulatory regime during the course of EU Accession. From the standpoint of the newcomers, displacement and dissociation is a vulnerable process, loaded with issues of power. I will come back to that later.
Applying claims of translation to EU matters, from the standpoint of the EU, it could be argued that “the goal of the translation is to bring together complex entities into a single object or idea that can be mobilised and circulated like a branded commodity or a taken-for-granted fact” (Clarke, 2002:115). Also, as Latour explains,“The problem of the builder of “fact” is the same as that of the builder of “objects”: how to convince others, how to control their behaviour, how to gather enough resources in one place, how to have the claim or the object spread out in time and space.” (Latour, 1987:131)
Building of “objects” in this context is closely associated with convincing, controlling, with claim-making and resources invested in making the objects work. As Jepsen and Pascual (2003) argue an essential part of the process of building common European identity is not so much based on common values and cultures as much as on socially constructed common ‘problems’, by which European countries are ‘threatened’. It produces not only common problems, but produces similar recipes and solutions “policy paradigms and cognitive filters through which the debate takes place”.
From the standpoint of the post-communist new member states, as well as candidate countries and aspirant countries, the displacement is taking place within a very strongly discursive framework. Seemingly it is a linguistic matter, but in fact it has other dimension to it. The question, for example of how to translate social exclusion into Hungarian was not that obvious, and even up to today there is no consensus behind the terminology. Indeed, the Hungarian version of the first National Action Plan on social inclusion (NAP/incl.) has become in its Hungarian version, the National Action Plan on ‘togetherness’ - reflecting an explicit rejection of using the term inclusion, with its connotation of hierarchical relations between those who include and who are included and the need for a term that implicates more equal nexuses. The case of social exclusion is also highly debated. Is it an active verb indicating an active initiation of exclusion by somebody (such as the state) or is it a passive verb indicating that exclusion happens; people get excluded in one way or another? The complexity of the term, which combines processes, relations and situational aspects (Szalai, 2002) runs into cognitive and linguistic difficulties when it gets indigenised.
The new EU language has also promoted the upgrading of linguistic tools and developing skills for political correctness. In Hungary, the impact of the importation of the political correctness was strong, reducing negative labelling and prejudice inducing terms. On the other hand, these strong discursive pressures have their downside as well. For example, the term Roma was only used by the JIM and by the NAP because of EU pressure, otherwise policy-makers within Hungary would use the term Gypsies, which embraces more diverse groups within the Gypsy communities not only the Roma and which is the term used by these communities themselves.
These narratives of EU Accession as translation and dislocation can also be read as a ‘time-travel’, a term central to my paper and which captures a fundamental analytic aspects of EU Accession and integration from a post-communist standpoint. The need for translation is not only a matter of ‘phase and time delay’, in the sense that the nature of the catch-up is not only legal harmonisation and the adoption of the new language in itself - the process embraces more general dynamics of welfare state development. What we can witness in post-communist Europe is that even before a developed welfare state can emerge, the necessary reforms of it are already on the agenda (Szalai, 2002). For instance, within post-communist countries, the discourse on social exclusion comes onto the agenda before a poverty discourse could have evolved; the workfare agenda comes in before they develop a strong sense of social citizenship; they face third way issues before exploring in any meaningful sense the first two and governance is talked about when these countries think in terms of governments. One of the biggest challenges for Central Eastern European countries is how to cope with such ‘indigestible’ EU terms and ideas and whether they can productively go through this ‘time-travel’ that they are asked to perform. It is a time-leap from post-communist, post-transitional social policy to - using Jessops (2002) classification – a post-national Schumpeterian workfare regime, pretty much without the stage of an economically sustainable Keynesian national welfare state and without the meanings that it generated. The ‘time-leap’ of post-communist social policy into the EU agenda, strongly promoting a post-national workfare regime, ‘essentialises’ and reinforces particular meaning-making, sense-making, language-making, claim-making processes. The next section aims to demonstrate aspects of this time-leap and claims that this EU call for a time-leap makes these processes fundamentally vulnerable
The vulnerable paths of time-travel and the politics of dialoguing post-communist and EU social policy
EU Accession has ‘imported’, ‘produced’, and worked with a number of EU ‘objects’ including inscriptions such as the Joint Memoranda on Social Inclusion (JIMs), and National Action Plans on social inclusion (NAPs/incl.), common indicators (Laeken indicators), or various issue networks all linked to the Open Method of Coordination. The aim of the following section is to look at some of the inscribed social policy in post-communist Europe and ‘dialogue’ them with EU initiatives to demonstrate the vulnerability of the discursive time travel which is to take place. In each of the subsection below, I first discuss aspects of post-communist social policy which are strongly inscribed into the JIMs and after I dialogue these characteristics with EU policy frameworks responsively.
1. From the lack of poverty discourse into the fight against social exclusion
One of the emblematic buzzwords of EU social policy is social inclusion/social exclusion. In many post-communist countries these terms became fashionable particularly amongst politicians, for whom the concept is broad and foggy enough, but also amongst social policy-makers who saw the term as a ‘window of opportunity’ to promote their social policy agenda not as a narrowly perceived ‘poor policy’, but as a ‘societal policy’. The social exclusion discourse arrived to a context in which the ‘silencing’ of poverty was a strong communist legacy that had a surprisingly long lasting effect long after the transition. In the 90s, the poverty discourse has been influenced by the path dependent ideological resistance to put poverty onto the public agenda; the political risks associated by explicitly referring to a widespread phenomenon of not only poverty but also impoverishment; by the lack of ‘data’, and by seemingly technical, yet strongly symbolic aspects of policy issues such as not having an official poverty line, or the poverty line not creating entitlements to benefits (lack of social citizenship). The story below is about the lack of narrative around poverty in Croatia, but with broader implications for other post-communist countries too.
In Croatia, the very first (!) data on poverty was provided by the 1998 study of the World Bank, which showed that the poverty rate in Croatia was 11% at the time. During my fieldwork it was striking how little comments that study generated in terms of poverty discourse. When I asked my interviewee what they thought about poverty rate in Croatia, not much response followed. I soon realised that what is missing from Croatia, as well as from Hungary, is the narratives around poverty. Stories, which are able to claim that poverty ‘rose drastically’, ‘increased sharply’. Instead the data that are produced are like ‘naked numbers’. They are not able to generate public discourses and political claims, rather they are only instruments in the hand of World Bank to ‘technocratize’ the issue of poverty and develop administrative practices around them.
This political ‘instrumentalisation’ of poverty is apparent in many inscriptions, such as the Joint Inclusion Memorandum (JIM). The Hungarian JIM for example argues that the decentralisation of social assistance and social care system was a political decision to enhance local autonomy without providing the sufficient funding to provide minimum resources to the poor. Estonia is surprisingly straightforward when it is arguing that baseline for social assistance benefits are anything, but reflects needs and minimal subsistence. In other countries devaluation of the real value of social assistance and other poverty measures (i.e. evictions), or non-decisions have shaped poor policies.
“There is no legal definition of poverty or social exclusion, nor a national poverty line laid down in Estonia.” (Estonian JIM)
“The Subsistence Minimum Act does not in itself establish entitlement to any benefit”. (Slovakian JIM)
“The subsistence level for granting social assistance, which is determined annually by the Parliament, reflects political decisions and budgetary constraints rather than any other considerations. It has remained unchanged from November 1997, inflation has eroded its real value and it does not even cover the cost of the minimum food basket. “(Estonian JIM)
“There is no official poverty line in Hungary” (NAP, Hungary)
We do not run into major risk when arguing that social inclusion policy as such does not exist in the new member states. Although some countries had a national anti-poverty strategy in place, poverty in most of these countries, has been conceived as a social and not a societal problem, a matter for the social assistance and social services. Poverty is seen as a sectoral issue, and therefore does not feature itself in other key sectoral legislations and institutional frameworks. It was not seen as a horizontal issue addressing a wide range of policies such as housing, education, transport, agriculture, culture, health, employment, economic policy and etc. The relevance of the EU framework is that social inclusion as such could potentially re-conceptualise the understanding of poverty and the policies built around it in the new member state. However, it is not a straightforward process. As a Hungarian social policy expert argues,‘In the Hungarian governmental structure exclusion is very much ‘EU’, in my opinion even up to today they do not understand what exactly it means, they don’t really know what to do with it, how to relate to this new term…despite all that everybody uses the term, but the term itself is very alien from this particular context’.
It is not obvious how poverty and social exclusion is linked to regional policy and transportation, how it is more than and different from income poverty, how social, local, community participation is to be encouraged, what are the forms of exclusion that needs to be fought against? Social exclusion would need a huge number of conceptual understanding, knowledge, policy tools, governance techniques and communication channels, institutional capacities, which are simply not present in the post-communist countries. The real question here is whether post-communist countries will be able to actively participate and take part in a Europe-wide fight against social exclusion in such circumstances.
2. From ’social knowledge’ deficit in post-communist Europe to the problems of EU knowledge production
The OMC social inclusion processes have very profoundly highlighted the lack of adequate social statistics and social data in post-communist new member states. There is a long list of the ‘lacks’. There is no regional data on poverty; no gender statistics; there are only estimates on the number of homeless people, people with disabilities, or on the number of Roma; no or unreliable data is available on social assistance beneficiaries or social service users; no data on discrimination just to name a few. As a Hungarian statistician explains so bluntly, “Hungary faces two problems, first, the household panels are not good, the second is the lack of register data. While in a company, data consciousness is essential and the audit culture is strong, in the social sector we have medieval conditions in terms of data management and registry systems. For example only 10% of local governments have software programme to register benefit claims….this means that data cannot answer any questions whatsoever”.
Even if there are data, often they are contradictory. As she explains,”With regard to the JIM we had a lot of conflicts over statistics and data with the EU; we had heated methodological debates, because in Hungary we have thousands different sources of data which explicitly contradict each other, particularly in the field of social policy, ranging from the number of poor, the income distribution, over the nature of inequalities, and the number of Roma. The number of Roma ranges between 80,000 to 800,000, the number of homeless people between 30,000 to 300,000, the inequalities between 5,2 to 9, so therefore we have huge differences”.
Theoretically speaking, social indicators and available data are key constituents of the ‘social knowledge’. Social statistics not only reflect meanings and understanding, but also are indicative of policy processes. The lack of available social data has a number of implications. Within the national policy-making context the lack of official data can and indeed do silence an issue, or it can prevent adequate policy measures from being taken. It can also delay or prevent corrections. For example, although a system of social assistance has been set up in the early 1990s in Hungary, the shortcomings of the system has only come to the centre of attention 10 years later, not least because there has been no available data on social assistance and social service coverage. The same problem was highlighted by the Czech JIM as well. Lack of data prevents monitoring, evaluation and thereby contributes to ‘broken policy cycles’ as well. In the EU context, the lack of social data creates its own disadvantages vis-à-vis the Structural Funds, since the lack of gender data, or data on disabilities, as well as the data-protection clauses in relation to Roma data prevents making these agendas to become horizontal issues and to be mainstreamed. The lack of data coincides with a lack of researches and findings, which makes the post-communist policy-making far from evidence-based
In this context, statistical coordination and respective knowledge production seems crucial. The EU has moved forward considerably when it acknowledged the need for statistical coordination and called for developing common indicators across Europe. Atkinson, Marlier and Nolan (2004:48) argue that the Laeken indicators “represents a major step forward in the development of EU social policy, and has the potential to transform the framework within which Member States develop their national policies to tackle poverty and social exclusion”. Indeed, it could be argued that the ‘knowledge production’ function in the light of the severe data and knowledge deficit in post-communist Europe makes the Laeken indicators and the related statistical coordination even more forceful by re-empowering social statistics in the region.
The Laeken indicators, however, pose very serious concerns in terms of their application to the new Member States. By using unified relative poverty measures in Central European countries not only dissociates poverty rates and figures, but also discursively constructs a unified European social space, where poverty is no greater problem in the new member states than in the EU 15, thereby officially underestimates the poverty rates in the post-communist countries. As a Hungarian statistician argues,”‘The problem is that the various consumption unit used reconfigure the face of poverty. If we use OECD 2 scale, we find that the elderly are poor; if we use OECD 1 then we find the young families are the poor. I think it is utterly unfair to use OECD 2 in Hungary, where the consumption patters are so different. Besides, the relative poverty measure would only be fair to use if we would consider the PPP, but it does not happen, because it is not in the interests of the EU. I find it highly politically motivated that the EU on the one hand re-eradicates the profile of poverty by using OECD 2 scale, while on the other hand the relative poverty measures hide away the inequalities within the Enlarged EU.’
Insisting on problematic and contested measurements, Laeken indicators so far not only rejected absolute poverty measures, but also proved to be inadequate to the societal context of post-communist countries. Despite the strong conformity and compliance pressures by the EU, the JIMs make no secrets of their strong disagreements over the indicators:
“Using the EU relative poverty line may, however, lead to an underestimate of the extent of poverty in Estonia, as well as in some other accession countries….“1999 Poverty Study9 argued that the relative poverty line (i.e. 50% or 60% of median income) is not the best indicator to characterise the poverty situation in transition economies. This is because incomes are generally low for a large part of the population, varying relatively little from the median income, while 50% or 60% of the median income may not be sufficient to meet even the basic needs of the household. “ (Estonian JIM)
“In contrast to the approach used in the EU, experts in Lithuania consider that the information about consumer expenditure is more credible than the information on household income for measuring poverty and social exclusion. For this reason they use expenditure and not income indicators to measure relative poverty and inequality. However, in the EU context, Eurostat and the indicators endorsed at the Laeken European Council opt for income indicators as these better reflect opportunities whereas consumption reflects choices. “(Lithuanian JIM)
“The measurement of income inequalities raises several methodological issues. In Hungary, there are different ways of collecting data. The Household Budget Survey of the HCSO measures lower inequality than other surveys of different research institutions. Based on the data of the HCSO, and according to the Laeken indicators 10% of the population had an income lower than 60% of the median of one consumption unit (EU-15: 15%). The proportion is higher (13%) using the 60% of per capita net median income as a poverty line. It is important to note at this point that because of the specificities of consumption patterns, experts in Hungary consider a different equivalence scale appropriate for Hungary.” (Hungarian JIM)
As a result, some methodological problems (equivalence scale used; the problems of sampling and the different stratification issues) result in a serious under-estimation of ‘official’ poverty in CEE. Not only the Laeken indicators under-estimate the poverty rates within the new member state countries, but also the poverty rate of the EU10 became very much similar to the poverty rate of the EU-15.
Although the Synthesis Report is balanced enough to claim that on the one hand deprivation and lack of basic necessities are more widespread in many of the new Member States and on the other hand the JIM highlighted a high level of vulnerability of some particular groups that tend not to be reflected in large scale national surveys, it does not prevent the situation that officially the overall poverty rate is declared lower than in the EU-15. This official under-estimation might undermine the importance and the weight of the fight against poverty in the political claim-making in post-communist countries. It could also contribute to the relative devaluation of the poverty agenda in relation to other claim-makings, such as fiscal, monetary or employment issues. By producing dislocated poverty indicators, EU herself is contributing to the controversial processes. An example of that is the way ‘non-official’ data are discredited. In Hungary, as far as EU is concern the ‘official’ data are those provided by the Central Statistical Offices (CSOs). However, according to a domestic consensus TARKI provides better data on income inequalities and shows higher level of poverty rate even calculated by the Laeken indicators than that of CSO. TARKI data are however discredited and silenced and became a victim of the EU construction itself.
The other problem of the current Laeken indicators is the rejection of absolute poverty measures, which moves away from the notion of a European minimum income as a key element in a European social safety net. The Synthesis Report indeed addressing the need of absolute poverty measure by arguing, that “ one major limitation of the Laeken indicators in relation to the new Member States is the absence of an indicator of the very poor, something which would help illustrate about the degree of deprivation in these counties. Furthermore, no new Member State has been able to compile the indicator on the “persistence of poverty” because the household panel survey needed for the compilation of this particular indicator has not been conducted yet in new Member States. This is certainly an argument for complementing the relative poverty indicator with additional measures (absolute or non-monetary) in the future.” (emphasis added)
Atkinson, Marlier and Nolan (2004:59) also argue that “(t)he decision to place the main emphasis on relative rather than absolute or fixed thresholds may, however, need to be revisited in the context of an enlarged Union.” Obviously calculating absolute poverty measures would have very different discursive implications for the direction of EU social policy, however, EU has to consider the ways enlargement has rewrote the social landscape of the European Union and the ways it might influence its own thinking about social issues.
3. From’ deserted’ social policy governance to multilevel governance?
I use the term governance in this context as the configuration of interactive nexus’ between various stakeholders and actors. One of the theses of institutionalist scholars in the transitional context is the ‘strong states-weak societal actors’ configuration. Let’s sidestep the problem of whether post-communist states are strong or weak themselves, rather lets look into what are the representations that the JIMs employ in terms of major stakeholders of social inclusion.
“Integration of social inclusion policies will require a strengthening of the sense of responsibility and motivation among individual stake-holders to take part in the solution to these problems.” (Slovakia)
“an overall lack of public confidence in the ability of the state and municipal institutions to change and improve the current situation, as well as … a lack of trust by people in their own ability to improve their own living conditions.” (Slovakia)
“In order to survive NGOs often design their activities in accordance with priorities announced by foundations rather than according to governmental strategies or action plans. For this reason NGOs are not very active in addressing important issues with a national dimension. There is some fragmentary evidence of effective co-operation between governmental institutions and NGOs, but this experience has not been expand on. There is no universally accepted model of co-operation to define the quality and continuation of NGO work spell out responsibility and guarantee transparent funding.” (Lithuania)
The textual landscape of the JIMs is representative of a strongly centralised governance system. The state, the government, the responsible Ministry initiates, runs, finances programs, institutions, services and provisions. The proportion of reference towards state actors in relation to NGOs or other institutional non-state actors is 80 to 20 for example in case of Slovenia and Czech Republic, but even worse 90 to 10 in case of other countries. The role of non-governmental actors in the preparation of the NAP was also unclear and unimagined in Hungary. As a ministry officials argued, the NAP is a document produced by the public administration. Therefore, the participation of the NGOs in the current institutional form is meaningless. The document was produced through the public administration procedures, and as a result NGOs could only have a say at the end of the process, when the document is ready. However, at the time, it is not much to be said about the document, because it will not be changed substantially. All in all, I don’t really see the role of NGOs in this process. And in any case, what would they have to contribute?
NGOs on the one hand have a representation in which they are partners in service provisions in field such as homelessness with a kind of ‘localised service provision discourse’, on the other hand they are represented as too diverse, quantitatively expanded, but whose qualitative dimension is to be improved, opportunistic and lack sufficient resources. They are mainly marginalized stake-holders. NGOs are not represented as ‘voices’, and they are not presented enough as the host of social inclusion through their own programmes and innovative initiatives. For example let us have no doubt that the Roma chapter of the Hungarian JIM would look very different if drafted by Roma NGOs.
Citizens are passive subjects on the bases of being residents of disadvantages area, subject of discrimination or prejudices, but mostly as excluded from the labour market. Interestingly, both the JIMs and the NAPs are tendentiously avoided the term citizen, or citizenship. Rather they would talk about population, groups, or people.
Employers and business actors are completely absent from the JIMs. The only reference to corporate social responsibility (again, a term highly unknown in CEE) can be found in the Slovenian JIM. The JIMs generally take ‘market’ as to be enhanced and served, but not involved and treated as partners in social inclusion. An exception is the German know-how of family-friendly workplace initiatives – which was ‘imported’ by NGOs.
Local communities are also under-referenced. In the context that they appear, they are seen as local initiatives that ‘should be strengthened’ without any meaningful reference on the hows, or are supported by international actors such as UNDP or UK government. Voluntary work is only referenced in a couple of cases where either a new legislation entered into force or is in preparation. Community-based services are in development, yet these initiatives are coming from the central governments rather than would result from bottom-up initiatives. Local communities have also lost cultural public spaces.
In what way OMC is opening up the space for multilevel governance? The ‘construction’ of the JIM was itself too narrow in terms of the negotiating partners being the Commission and the representatives of the member states. Neither in the drafting, nor in the negotiating NGOs has been involved. Due to the much closed system of public administration procedures there has been no meaningful role for the NGOs to take. The Social Dialogue, if it takes place at all, takes place in the final stage (and not alongside), where there is already a ready prepared draft version of the document. But again, what the very term social dialogue means is by no means evident. As a Slovenian trade unionist argued, civil servants don’t know anything about social dialogue; they simple don’t know what it is. Yet, they have to report about it, but they don’t know what to say. There was some social dialogue taking place, but it was not mentioned in the reports, because they did not know that, for example the fact those collective agreements are part of the social dialogue. Now, they know it better.
In the Hungarian NAP process NGOs could express concerns, could demand issues to be included, but if there is was no government action in the field, it would not get incorporated. NGOs have been seen as under-informed and inadequate in their comments by policy-makers.
All in all, NGOs have been largely excluded from the social inclusion process generated by EU Accession and the participation in OMC. This exclusion, if not counterbalanced, will result in further marginalisation of non-governmental actors, therefore there is an urgent need to put more formalised emphasis on involving NGOs, and on governance techniques that can promote a more diverse and more open policy-making mode.
As a matter of fact, compared to the JIM, the preparation of the first NAP has not brought any changes, at least in Hungary. Although social dialogue is promoted by the EU, it did not gain more meaning since the JIM, if anything; social dialogue was weaker in the case of the first NAP/incl. because of the timescale. The framework for social dialogue is too soft, does not press governments to ‘hassle’ with civil voices. As a result, there is a danger that this dynamic reinforces path-dependent processes of strong states-weak societal actors. The question of how to amplify civil voices is not an easy one, however. How to involve previously marginalized actors into this space? The European Anti-Poverty Network (EAPN) and the Social Platform is active in broadening its membership to NGO networks in the New Member States. These organisations can channel some of the voices to the Commission; however, there is a need for a formal and strong institutionalisation of non-governmental actors into the OMC, since there is already a deficit in that respect as far as JIM and most likely the first NAP/incl. concerns. Otherwise, non-governmental actors will be left largely outside of the crucial meaning-making, sense-making processes whereby EU will be translated and indigenised.
4. Convergence, cohesion and social inclusion: the financial realities of the fight against social exclusion
The budgetary issues and their implications are carefully avoided by the EU. The Synthesis Report mentioned above for example, does not refer to public welfare expenditures in CEE anywhere in the document; indeed the economic overview is preoccupied with the concerns over the convergence criteria such as budgetary deficit. The concerns over budgetary deficit then is only linked to employment, but not linked at all to concerns over poverty rate and exclusion.
There is no guideline, recommendation or explicit reference to the conflicting objectives between convergence criteria and meaningful social inclusion objectives, despite pressing and conflicting demands on welfare spending and reducing public social expenditures.
“Given a low level of public expenditure, it is small wonder that financing of the social security system accounts, despite positive changes in the country’s budget deficit, for a small proportion of GDP, viz. approximately 16 percent. Only a small proportion of total public social expenditure goes directly towards addressing poverty-related issues” (Latvian JIM)
“Pro-active employment policy (PEP) includes a set of measures aimed at ensuring balance in the labour market, i.e. counselling, retraining, socially driven jobs, professional practice for graduates and the young, sheltered workshops and workplaces, and public works. The PEP is a priority approach for achieving the goal of increasing the accessibility of the labour market and maintaining employment for disadvantaged groups. However, it is limited by the financial funds available (of the total of employment policy budget 60 - 70% is assigned to passive employment policy measures).” (Czech JIM)
“The development of active labour market policy is also impeded by an inadequate level of financing.” (Latvian JIM)
Seemingly, the emphasis on coordination and policy learning, exchange of good practice and developing common indicators does not have budgetary implications, or at least allows for the silencing of these concerns. However, in the context of the new Member States, if anybody takes the JIM and the NAP/incl. seriously, there are very serious financial implications.
“Given the low level of public expenditure, it is small wonder that financing of the social security accounts, despite positive changes in the country’s budget deficit, for a small proportion of GDP, viz. approximately 16 percent. Only a small proportion of total public social expenditure goes directly towards addressing poverty-related issues.” (Lithuanian JIM)
“however, in 2003 the Hungarian Government started fiscal consolidation and significantly reduced public expenditures.”
“Financial forms of family support ….unfortunately they are insufficient owing to their low level and as a result they are not effective in protecting families from poverty.” (Polish JIM)
“Unemployment benefits are low” (Lithuanian JIM)
“Assistance to persons and families in need is often limited only to granting social assistance cash benefits, meaning that the causes of poverty are not sufficiently tackled by using active labour market measures, housing, social councelling, rehabilitation and care services and other social work measures.” (Estonian JIM)
“In the near future, the low poverty rate may be jeopardised if unemployment continues to grow, unless measures to create a sufficient number of new jobs are taken in time. It is not currently possible to predict the impact of measures prepared as part of the public finances reform (including measures concerned with compulsory social expenditure). The slowdown in income growth in the government-financed sectors may have a negative impact on poverty development.” (Czech JIM)
What is the meaning of the NAP, in the context of the new member states, as a new social inclusion strategy? And in what way a strategy becomes meaningful in the context of decreasing public social expenditure, while the conclusions of both the JIM and the NAP is that needs are not met? Despite the fact that according to ESSPROS data Hungary has a lower public social expenditure as a share of GDP that the average of EU-15, due to the EMU requirements the monetary strategy is envisaging 4% cut in 4 years in public social spending. There is a danger here, that NAP is becoming another paperwork.
It is also unclear how convergence and cohesion relates to each other. As I have argued elsewhere (Lendvai, 2004) “the very low levels of transfers to the newcomers envisaged in the 2000-2006 budget (Rhodes, 2003) too seems to reinforce the political compromises on solidarity criteria and the need for redistribution since a variety of agreements explicitly disadvantages the candidate countries” needs to be corrected not only in terms of funds available for these countries, but also in terms of Structural Funds rules that are more inclusive for poverty measures other than employment. This is further supported by the common reference in the JIMs to the incapacity of the new Member States to reduce the growing regional inequalities. In the current programming period social inclusion is at the margin of both European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and European Social Fund (ESF), and although ESF regulations facilitate social services to be more closely working together with employment services, yet the Structural Funds regulation would need to be more flexible to address issues such as housing projects, child welfare service developments, social service development for elderly, or severely disabled.
5. From policy fragmentation to a new policy-making culture
The post-communist language and governance construction is strongly sectoral and compartmental. The key actor is the Ministry responsible for the field. Sectoralism is prevalent in legislation, in decision-making, in institutional framework (both in terms of decentralised and deconcentrated institutions), in implementation as well as in budgeting. Sectorally organised Ministries possess both financial and institutional resources.
“The task of combating poverty and social exclusion requires concerted action on the part of many central and local government agencies, as well as territorial self-governments. Integration of policies at both the design and implementation stages is a major challenge to a government administration used to strict compartmentalisation. “ (Polish JIM)
“Despite the Government's commitment to poverty reduction, the lack of a clearly defined policy framework and the lack of a mechanism to promote cooperation between agencies on social exclusion and poverty reduction issues have had a negative impact on the current situation. Although several activities are carried out in different policy areas which either directly or indirectly promote social inclusion, essential improvements in the situation of the groups at risk of social exclusion have not been achieved. The drawing up of the Joint Inclusion Memorandum (JIM), with its integrated and multisectoral approach to solving the problem, can therefore be considered as a crucial step forward in the development of policies to reduce social exclusion in Latvia.” (Latvian JIM)
“Despite the above-mentioned cooperation between the social policy stakeholders, there is scope for improvement not only in cooperation but also in terms of mutual information and public awareness of the nature and extent of poverty and exclusion within the country. There is a noticeable lack of experience of inter-ministerial and cross-sectoral collaboration on joint activities, which is a handicap given the importance of an integrated approach to tackling poverty and social exclusion. Insufficient public awareness has much to do with the lack of relevant definitions of these phenomena and, until recently, the failure to acknowledge them in the context of the policy debate. As a result, the institutional responsibilities and staff resources for addressing poverty and social exclusion are underdeveloped. This concerns mainly the State authorities, but also NGOs, academia and the research community.” (Slovak JIM)
“Until now the cooperation within various national levels has not been sufficiently active and coordinated. Each of the institutions described in the previous chapters, when implementing the functions delegated to it and performing tasks for poverty and social exclusion reduction, relies more on its own strengths and makes insufficient use of the advantages of cooperation and networking. Activities aimed at groups at risk of social exclusion have, until now, been fragmented and insufficiently focused and integrated to meet the needs of specific groups. They have mostly focussed on addressing the consequences and too little attention has been paid to preventive measures. The existing stereotypes that poverty and social exclusion reduction is solely a matter for social assistance needs to be discarded.” (Latvian JIM)
In this institutional framework cooperation and coordination are almost impossible, but at least slowly understood. As one of my interviewee from the Ministry of Labour told me,‘The French twinning expert, who arrived to Hungary in 1999, kept telling us that the major problem of the Hungarian public administration is the lack of coordination. We did not understand what he was saying, and kept telling him, that we do coordinate, we do send materials to fellow ministries etc. Only two years later, with the start of the Structural Fund programming we started to get an idea what he was talking about and how right he was in making that point.’
Or similarly, as a Hungarian academic put it in reference to the taxation on minimum wage: ‘The big systems can only think about themselves, can only think within their own institutional competencies; what happens outside does not interest them at all.’
However, despite new initiatives to promote coordination it is not an easy matter. The public administration is strongly conditioned institutionally not to cooperate. Ministries are trying to maximise their own available funds, therefore there is a disincentive, if it possible at all, to share funds and responsibilities. Issues are clear-cut divided. No surprise then that the JIMs call for introducing cooperation between welfare and employment services, between social workers and health professionals, education and social services, social and regional development. Sectoralism and their limitations are also apparent in the Structural Funds measures, in terms of difficulties in designing inter-sectoral, cross-sectoral measures. In Hungary, for instance, the Human Resource Development Operational Programme does not contain a single measure that is cross-sectoral. This also results in duplication of services, since, for example, employment services instead of cooperating with local social services, create their own ‘psycho-social’ counselling services. The massive institutionalisation that took place in the last 5 years in these countries in the field of equal opportunities, social exclusion, regional development, e-inclusion and employability could well – without enhanced cooperation and the strengthening the governance capacities for coordination - result in overcomplicated nexus of services incomprehensible for citizens, and wasteful in terms of public funds.
Mainstreaming is again a fairly unknown concept, which is difficult to implement, not least because these countries are suppose to mainstream gender before having a good knowledge and public debate over the nature of gender inequalities. As a gender mainstreaming expert in Hungary argues, that in the Structural Fund gender issue is a horizontal agenda which means that every project which gets approved has to demonstrate its effect on gender. It is all very well, the problem is only that nobody has much of an idea how to asses gender impacts. Our guideline is very broad and very general, indeed useless for a number of project types. What we end up with is that neither the applicants nor the evaluators have any idea how to deal with the gender issue. So it is quietly slipping out of the framework.
However, EU does contribute to the re-conceptualisation of social policy by renaming and reframing social agendas which was de-legitimised and amortised, often associated with communism and as a result discursively marginalised on the political agenda. On the other hand, coordination is also a matter of politics. Who gets to coordinate what, and how, is a political issue.
On the other hand, the OMC has very importantly set up and institutionalised an intensive communication channels between the Commission and national policy-makers, which had not existed before. Various researches have demonstrated, (see for example Fink-Hafner and Lajh, 2003) that generally speaking, the Ministry responsible for social policy was not among core ministries, nor in ‘outer circle’ in managing the ‘EU business’. The OMC/incl. was the first meaningful project which required national social policy-makers to develop EU related skills in communication, planning, negotiations, lobbying. As Fink-Hafner and Lajh (2003) argue,”The biggest problems and concerns in managing European business in Slovenia involve Slovenia’s ‘European cadre’ capacity, above all: a.) the EU personnel deficit; b.) the absence of any previous (practical) experience of EU cadre; c.) the lack of foreign language knowledge; d.) the lack of modern organisational, administrative culture and e.) the only recently acquired knowledge of the EU’s ‘policy-taking’, and the lack of an EU ‘policy-making’ culture.” (emphasis added)
Crucially, from the point of view of the new member states, the OMC created a new policy space in which social policy makers can develop key organisational, administrative, communicational skills and indeed have access to direct ‘readings’ and deliberation platforms of EU social policy. It also intensified domestic communications, in between policy-makers. The NAP as argued by a policy-maker, provided such a synthesis, which the public administration has never seen before, nobody before put all these different programmes together in a united framework. It is great, but on the other hand it creates scare, public administration gets scared of the density of the programmes and of the commitment they imply.
6. From dual systems and non-delivery to the danger of beauty contest
The Hungarian JIM was the first ever official document, which stated that the majority of the local self-governments breach the law by not providing the basic social services assigned to them by the Social Act. The JIM was able to voice certain discontent which was not possible before. But Hungary is not an exception. The countries face very similar problems in this regards; in many countries a kind of ‘messy contract’ is in operation whereby instead of the legal framework, an informal practice of non-delivery is prevails. Social services are not provided, or provided at a poor level, social assistance capitation grants are not spent on purpose. A dual system exists in which legislation provides the formal framework for social policy, but in practice non-delivery, non-implementation and the lack of law enforcement set the sites for informal structures and arrangements.
“This results in non-delivery of a large proportion of social assistance benefits to the respective target audiences - the poorest residents, and social assistance benefits as well as social services are often funded in accordance with the rule “if anything is left over” (Latvian JIM)
“A weakness of the current system is the legislative framework for social services. This is not line with current trends and practices. Quality assurance systems have not been widely used in the area of provision of social services. The present method of financing does not allow equal access for all social service providers, with regional and State- run institutions being given an advantage over other providers, which discourages municipalities and non-profit non-governmental organisations from providing social services. There is no integrated information system for social services.” (Czech JIM)
“In fact, a large number of small settlements are unable to maintain general services (in 2001, 30% of the local governments operated all forms of primary social services), hence the principle of equal access is infringed…. The change of regime created the system of local self-governments and strengthened local autonomy. The new system was over-decentralised in many respects but fulfilled the political mission that people were able to test their local autonomy and local political power. The responsibility for handling social problems was delegated by the Social Act (1993) to the local authorities by means of financing shared with the central budget. In the fight against unemployment, local government was offered relatively few instruments and funds.” (Hungarian JIM)
Both quantitatively and qualitatively social services are underdeveloped; local self-governments or in some cases municipalities or regional authorities providing these services are left with insufficient financial and human resources. The central government-local government nexus are weak, or strongly political, which creates a fragmented delivery system.
Dual structures are also indicative of the role of rhetorics, and the gap between declarative and actual policies. Europeanisation on paper is a real danger, as the OMC becoming a beauty contest. Indeed, in terms of both the JIMs and the NAPs, the most interesting questions would touch upon the silences, the ‘not-told’, which is what are the issues that have been ‘missed out’ from the documents. For instance, the European Roma Right Centre’s opinion on the Hungarian JIM is a good example, how important issues are not touched upon (i.e. discrimination, evictions, forced fertilisation of Roma women, housing segregation). What inscribed social policy is indicative of in the cases of the JIMs and NAPs are not only the current meanings and understandings of key issues, challenges and agendas, but also the ways it is able to hide away the ‘lacks’. As one of the Hungarian civil servants phrased it once referring to the Hungarian NAP is ‘the powder on the face’.
Conclusion
There are two implications to all of this. The first is practical in nature and concerns the construction of the OMC from a post-communist standpoint, and the second is a theoretical claim.
The first practical implication is the problem of the emerging governance as far as the primary, if not exclusive, nexus of these processes has been the national governments-EU nexus. EU itself, within this highly unequal set-up of construction (such as conditionality and compliance pressures) during Accession, had little, if no capacity to initiate and maintain EU-civil, or EU-regions nexuses. As a result, access to information and knowledge crucial for the participation and the ‘inclusion’ in the Accession process has been very limited for NGOs, voicing organisations or any other societal stakeholders. This reinforces previous transitional paths of ‘strong states - weak societal actors’. Indeed, it could be argued that the initial phase of OMC is not only not participatory, but indeed exclusionary for societal actors. EU action is needed to institiutionalise the role of NGOs and other societal voices stronger within the construction of the OMC.
Second practical implication is the inescapable issue of the relational terms between convergence, cohesion and inclusion needs to be addressed. Central Eastern European countries are facing the reduction of public welfare expenditures, the lengthening and in some countries the increase in unemployment, massive child poverty and a deepening of poverty. In this context the question is what is the meaning of any document let it be JIM, or NAP and their respective targets, goals in the context of fiscal consolidation on which EU maintains a silence. In the post-communist context where services are underdeveloped, where regional inequalities are growing, where the governance is weak these pulling aspects are even more pressing.
Thirdly, Laeken indicators need to be revised. The current system under-estimates the official figures of poverty, which in turn, might undermine the effort to gain more political support and understanding for the fight against social exclusion. EU needs more flexibility more adaptation and more institutional capacity to deal with the diversity that Enlargement have bought about.
The second set of implication is rather theoretical. As I have tried to demonstrate, I see EU Accession and the participation of post-communist countries in the EU project as a discursive time travel, or time-leap. The implication of this analysis is that EU accession is fundamentally a vulnerable process which is associated with translation, displacement, and dissociation. Furthermore, EU social policy is as hard as it is soft. It is a strongly political process, which creates new boundaries, enables some voices, while silences others; institutionalises some communication channels, while neglecting others; represent and re-represents social and economic issues; conditions certain behaviours and interest, while neglects others. The vulnerability coupled with strong political and power relations, newly created power chains, and the possible construction of disempowerment. But it is not only the vulnerabilities of the newcomers; it is as much the vulnerability of the ‘EU project’ itself, which takes place in a new societal space and landscape. EU can not be taken for granted, neither in Central Eastern Europe, nor in ‘core’ Europe.
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