Accession and Social Policy: The Case of the Czech Republic

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.