Introduction

A central theme underpinning all the chapters in this book relates to the ‘meaning’ of policy in the context of policy studies. Part of the context for this relates to the tensions between representations of policy as a technical process and as a facet of ‘the Social’ – here explicitly capitalised in its reference to the ways people realise themselves collectively as interactive human beings in a societal setting. This chapter sets this debate within a discourse about values and ideology.

Over the past few decades there has been fierce debate among politicians and policy makers about what constitutes ‘the good society’, ranging from a social democrat vision of an all-encompassing universalist and collectivist welfare state through to a market liberal vision of a minimalist state, merely providing a safe social environment in which individuals and families can freely pursue their own interests. Central to this range of visions are sets of values. This chapter explores these themes not at a national level, but in the context of the enlarging European Union (EU) where, from its very inception, a debate has taken place between what can be broadly identified as a social versus an economic vision of its identity. At the turn of the twenty-first century the battle lines have been drawn under the banners of, on the one hand, Social Europe in the guise of the European Social Model (ESM) and, on the other, the goal of the Lisbon accord of the EU becoming the world's most dynamic and competitive knowledge-based economy. Central to this debate is the question of whether the ESM is still viable (if it ever was) or whether the enlarged EU – nudged by the World Bank – is moving inexorably towards a regional ‘race to the bottom’ with the dismantling of social benefits in the liberal market-oriented political economy of an unstoppable globalisation.

This debate is particularly pertinent at the present time with the enlarged EU 27 contemplating its identity and how different it is from that of the EU 15 and how it might be even further affected if Turkey were ever to join. The process of enlargement not only affects the practicalities of harmonisation and compatibility between institutions, policies and procedures but also the extent to which there are common values, or even a vision of what such values might actually be.