Martin Potůček supporters of Europeanisation have found it difficult to sell this paradox at home. CONCLUSIONS The EU's role in shaping certain domestic policy fields, namely social policy, should not be overestimated; the obvious discrepancy between the Copenhagen criteria of accession, covering a very limited part of the social welfare agenda and installed in 1993, and the Lisbon Strategy, laid out as an explicit and balanced public policy programme for the candidate countries as late as in 2002 and politically and administratively executed only since 2004, opened a considerable space for other, more active and influential international actors, namely the World Bank and International Monetary Fund led by the Washington Consensus' neo-liberal ideology of the 1990s(Potůček, 2004). This institutional weakness created a sharp socio-political tension: The new member states entered the European Union with their health, social, and employment policies not developed enough to cope with the legitimate demands of this strategic policy document. There is an urgent need to solve the discrepancy between the enormous public tasks of high employment, capacity building in health and social services, alleviation of poverty, and strengthening social cohesion in the new member states, and their insufficient social, economic, and administrative implementation capacities. The situation has been slowly changing only from the beginning of this century: the European Union has helped with pushing the social policy issues higher up the political agenda ladder, with institution building, and the transfer of skills and money from the old member states. Nevertheless, the Open Method of Coordination proved to be too weak an instrument in this respect. National initiatives within the new member states would be an added value to this EU-centred effort. A programmatic document called The Social Doctrine of the Czech Republic, developed by a group of scholars for this purpose in the Czech Republic, might become an inspiration for other countries, even if it failed to directly influence the social policy making in the country(Sociální doktrína České republiky, 2002). All in all, only the institutions of the enlarged EU have the potential to become the main- if not the only- institutional umbrella against the pressures of economic globalisation in preventing further widening of the gap between those who work and those who are unemployed, those who have and those who have not, those included and those excluded in the member states. 144