Fighting Social Exclusion under EU Horizon 2020. Enhancing the Legal Enforceability of the Social Inclusion Recommendations?

Abstract

In this article, we take a closer look at EU policy to promote social inclusion in the framework of the Europe 2020 strategy. Concretely the legal consequences of the incorporation of social inclusion in the employment guidelines will be addressed. Since the employment guidelines are now connected in a structural way to the economic guidelines, we take a closer look at the monitoring procedures that accompany the implementation of these economic guidelines. Furthermore we test the potential legal consequences of the integrated approach by unravelling (the formulation of) the social inclusion-related Country Specific Recommendations.

A first legal consequence relates to the question of the extent to which the harder sanctioning tools, which have been developed for controlling the EU's economic recommendations, can be similarly applied to the guidelines relating to social inclusion (such as the application of EU fines in cases when recommendations are not followed up by states). In our opinion there is a spill-over effect only in relation to social inclusion recommendations that have sufficient economic or budgetary relevance (‘social inclusion recommendations of the negative kind’, supporting economic or budgetary goals). In other words, social inclusion recommendations that support only social objectives do not enjoy the stronger legal effects of the integrated monitoring approach. From analysis of the concrete Country Specific Recommendations we demonstrate that the incorporation of social inclusion into the employment guidelines has two additional consequences. On the one hand, social inclusion recommendations are nowadays formulated mainly in terms of employment objectives. On the other hand, the link with social inclusion also has implications for recommendations in the field of employment and economy that should not be to the detriment of social inclusion. In this way the horizontal clause of art. 9 TFEU seems to extend to non-legislative measures, such as the guidelines developed in socio-economic monitoring processes.