1. COHESION POLICY

2. Economic Cohesion
Cohesion policy works to strengthen the internal bonds of the European marketplace by supplementing national efforts to reduce economic disparities, mainly through the use of three structural funds (below) that redistribute wealth from richer to poorer parts of the EU.

3. Assessments of Cohesion
Opinion on the effectiveness of structural funds is divided, mainly because the link between cause and effect in economic matters is difficult to determine. Criticisms of structural funds include:
There are too many funds, creating duplication.
They generate greater inequalities within poorer states.
Too big a share of the funding goes to the poorer regions of wealthy states.
The effect of the global economic crisis has been to pull states in different directions. Questions remain about how cohesion policy is best pursued.

4. Social Policy
EU social policy addresses improved working and living conditions, and the rights of workers, women, and the disabled.
The Treaty of Rome referred to the need to improve working conditions and to raise the standard of living, but most early Community initiatives were more rhetorical than practical.
The idea of a European Social Model has been more aspirational than actual, although the approaches of north-western, southern, and eastern states have achieved closer uniformity with time.
One problem that European social policy has so far been unable to address has been persistent high unemployment in many parts of the EU, a problem made much worse by the effects of the global economic crisis.

5. Education Policy
At least initially in the interests of promoting the free movement of workers, the EU since the late 1980s has been increasingly active in efforts to promote mobility in education.
The Bologna Process (a European rather than an EU initiative) has guided efforts since 1999 to generate a European Higher Education Area.
Taking its name from the EU’s Erasmus project, recent years have seen the rise of the Erasmus generation, a group of mainly younger, better-educated, and more cosmopolitan Europeans with a heightened sense of pan-European identity.