Question 3 Discuss the difficulties in seeking to adopt a common social policy and social welfare agenda among the E.U. member states.
Introduction
A social policy is a public policy and practice in the areas of health care, human services, criminal justice, education, and labor. (Malcolm Wiener Centre) In European Union, it has passed a long way to seeking adopt a common social policy and social welfare agenda among the E.U. member states. Caune et al has summarized the process of social policy into three steps followed by the milestone of EU. First stage was to create a common market and keep the national welfare policies. During the first stage E.U. did seek to establish a certain policy, such as freedom of movement for workers and freedom of establishment and equal pay and rights for migrant workers. The second stages was Maastricht treaty that creating Maastricht criteria as new economic policy regime and established ‘soft law management’. The thirds stage was focus onwards coordination and competition of national welfare policies. The treaty of Lisbon which is the recently moment in E.U. social policy, it defines E.U. seeks to assess the significance of the poverty/social inclusion open method of co-ordination in terms of what it indicates about the EU’s engagement with social policy.
From the historically, EU was did a lot of works to creating social policy and social welfare agenda. But E.U. still faces many difficult to making a common social policy among E.U. states. Furthermore, this essay will mainly discuss on the difficult in seeking to adopt a common social policy and social welfare agenda among the E.U. member states which are based understand and analyzed the history and concept of E.U. social policy.
Discussion
From the three stages of form a social welfare system, we could found European Union has really well social welfare systems as an example for the rest of the world. It has