2007. vol. 2. No. 2

The paper presents reflections on the debates and contradictory assessments raging around the 50th Anniversary of the Treaty of Rome on the future of the EU.  The author looks at the recent processes and objectives of the next decade through the historical prism of the European Community developments and concludes that crises and challenges have mostly, even though eventually,  served as a platform for innovative solutions and windows to a new level of cooperation. It is not mandatory that the Treaty of the Constitution for the EU should be the best tool, though, in the author’s  view, resort to the intergovernmental model is not an option.

Though the Open Method of Coordination was established by the Lisbon European Council, the study demonstrates that diverse tools of coordination emerging and maturing as the EU education policy was unfolding include almost a full specter of the OMC features, this being one of the factors accounting for the current success of this new mode of governance as a working method in Education. The study explores other factors of success for OMC in Education and suggests that Education should be relegated to the first group of policy areas of Claudio M. Radaelli’s classification, “demonstrating a deliberate attempt to use OMC as the main working method on the basis of the Council Conclusions” and adopting national action plans, indicators and benchmarks, biennial reporting as instruments in the “Education and Training 2010” programme.

The analysis hypothesizes that EU education policy agenda will continue to deepen and expand remaining under the subsidiarity principle and makes a positivist proposition that the OMC tools in the area of Education policy have a high capacity for strengthening both the horizontal and hierarchical interaction and shaping convergence of decisions and actions within the next decade.