Spillover in a soft policy era? Evidence from the Open Method of Co-ordination in education and training

In this paper we re-examine early neofunctionalist concepts of spillover, spill-around and build-up, and apply them to the case of the Open Method of Co-ordination (OMC) in education and training policy. We show that even an EU at ‘the end of integration’ can bind its Member States more closely together over time. In this way, we add to recent analyses of unanticipated spillover in ‘hard’ policies by showing that such can be the outcome of ‘soft’ policies too, and set out a hypothesis to guide future investigations.