Accession and social policy: the case of the Czech Republic

Abstract:

This paper assesses the place of EU accession among the determinants of the changes taking place in the Czech social policy after 1989. Compulsory social and health insurance were re-introduced in the early 1990s, along with a guaranteed subsistence minimum for all, and an institutionalized state employment policy. This paper argues that EU-derived policies have had only a limited impact on Czech social-policy reform, focusing mostly on institution building. This phenomenon can be attributed to the apparent discrepancy between Copenhagen criteria of accession (1993) and the Lisbon Strategy, which was accepted as a policy guideline in 2002. Thus, the main concept able to explain Czech social-policy development after 1989 is that of institutional and behavioural path dependency as the country exhibited resistance to change coupled with a strong adherence to the Bismarckian, corporatist, welfare state. This makes the Czech Republic a special case compared to the other Visegrad countries, where the pressure from neo-liberal public-policy concepts of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund found its expression in the introduction of more residual social policies.