European Union

The introduction of the single European currency, the euro, draws attention to the institutional deficit of the European Union: the organizational structures and forms of governance within which central banks and other monetary authorities are embedded within individual states, are lacking at the European level. This gives unusual prominence to financial structures. While the contributors to this collection do not agree in their evaluation of this phenomenon, they agree on its importance, and analyse different aspects of it in depth.

Contemporary political science assumes that ‘institutions matter’. But the governing institutions of the European Union are widely presumed to matter more than most. A commonplace assumption about the EU is that those working within European institutions are subject to a pervasive tendency to become socialised into progressively more pro-integration attitudes and behaviours. This assumption has been integral to many accounts of European integration, and is also central to how scholars study individual EU institutions. However, the theoretical and empirical adequacy of this assumption has never been properly investigated. This study examines this question in the context of an increasingly important EU institution, the European Parliament. The book integrates new theoretical arguments with a substantial amount of original empirical research. It develops a coherent understanding, based on simple rationalist principles, of when and why institutional socialisation is effective. This theoretical argument explains the main empirical findings of the book. Drawing on several sources of evidence on MEPs’ attitudes and behaviour, and deploying advanced empirical techniques, the empirical analysis shows the commonplace assumption about EU institutions to be false. European Parliamentarians do not become more pro-integration as they are socialised into the institution. The findings of the study generate some highly important conclusions. They indicate that institutional socialisation of political elites should be given a much more limited and conditional role in understanding European integration than it is accorded in many accounts. They suggest that MEPs remain largely national politicians in their attitudes, loyalties and much of their activities, and that traditional classifications of the European Parliament as a ‘supra-national’ institution are misleading. Finally, the study offers broader lessons about the circumstances in which institutions effectively socialise those working within them.

This book is an authoritative account of ethnic cleansing and its partial undoing in the Bosnian wars from 1990 to the present. The book combines a bird's-eye view of the entire war from onset to aftermath with a micro-level account of three towns that underwent ethnic cleansing and later the return of refugees. Through the lens of critical geopolitics, which highlights the power of both geopolitical discourse and spatial strategies, the book focuses on the two attempts to remake the ethnic structure of Bosnia since 1991. The first attempt was by ascendant ethnonationalist forces that tried to eradicate the mixed ethnic structures of Bosnia's towns, villages and communities. While these forces destroyed tens of thousands of homes and lives, they failed to destroy Bosnia-Herzegovina as a polity. The second attempt followed the war. The international community, in league with Bosnian officials, tried to undo the demographic consequences of ethnic cleansing. This latter effort has moved in fits and starts, but as the book shows, it has re-made Bosnia, producing a country that has moved beyond the stark segregationist geography created by ethnic cleansing.

Why have national governments of EU member states created and, over the past fifty years, successively endowed the European Parliament with supervisory, budgetary, and legislative powers? This book presents a three-staged argument to explain how the European Parliament acquired this power ‘trias’. First, it is argued that the construction of a supranational polity induces political elites in the member states to reflect on the implications posed by transfers of national sovereignty for domestic processes of democratic accountability and interest representation. It is shown empirically that there exists a strong correlation between national governments’ decisions to transfer sovereignty and political elites’ perception of a ‘democratic legitimacy deficit’ that triggers a search for institutional solutions for its remedy. In a second step, it is argued that political elites, first and foremost, domestic political parties, advance different proposals to alleviate the perceived ‘legitimacy deficit’. These proposals are derived from ‘legitimating beliefs’ that vary cross-nationally and across political parties. Consequently, the creation and empowerment of a supranational parliamentary institution plays a prominent but not exclusive role as potential remedy to the ‘democratic legitimacy deficit’. Third, the book illuminates the mechanisms through which ‘legitimating beliefs’ expressed by political elites and the behaviour of national governments who negotiate and decide on the creation and potential empowerment of the European Parliament are linked. What logic of action best captures national governments’ decisions to empower the European Parliament? The explanatory power of the theoretical argument will be explored by looking at three landmark cases in the European Parliament’s history: its creation as ‘Common Assembly’ of the ECSC Treaty and the concomitant acquisition of supervisory powers vis-à-vis the High Authority, the acquisition of budgetary powers (Treaty of Luxembourg of 1970) and of legislative powers (Single European Act signed in 1986). The developments ranging from the Maastricht Treaty to the adoption of the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe will also be analysed in the light of the theory.

How do state parties react to the challenge of peripheral parties demanding political power to be devolved to their culturally distinct territories? Is devolution the best response to these demands? Why do governments implement devolution given the high risk that devolution will encourage peripheral parties to demand ever more devolved powers? The aim of this book is to answer these questions through a comparative analysis of devolution in four European countries: Belgium, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom. The book argues that electoral competition between state and peripheral parties pushes some state parties to prefer devolution when their state-wide majorities or pluralities are seriously at risk. Devolution is an electoral strategy adopted in order to make it more difficult in the long term for peripheral parties to increase their electoral support by claiming the monopoly of representation of the peripheral territory and the people in it. The strategy of devolution is preferred over short-term tactics of convergence towards the peripheral programmatic agenda because the pro-periphery tactics of state parties in unitary centralized states are not credible in the eyes of voters. The price that state parties pay for making their electoral tactics credible is the ‘entrenchment’ of the devolution programmatic agenda in the electoral arena. The final implication of this argument is that in democratic systems devolution is not a decision to protect the state from the secessionist threat. It is, instead, a decision by state parties to protect their needed electoral majorities

With each legislative issue, legislators have to decide whether to delegate decision-making to the executive and/or to expert bodies in order to flesh out the details of this legislation, or, alternatively, to spell out all aspects of this decision in legislation proper. The reasons why to delegate have been of prime interest to political science. The debate has concentrated on principal-agent theory to explain why politicians delegate decision-making to bureaucrats, to independent regulatory agencies and to others actors and how to control these agents. By contrast, our research focuses on the question: Which actors are empowered by delegation? Are executive actors empowered over legislative actors? How do legislative actors react to the loss of power? What opportunities are there to change the institutional rules governing delegation in order to (re)gain institutional power and, with it influence over policy outcomes. We analyze the conditions and processes of change of the rules that delegate decision-making power to the Commission’s implementing powers under comitology. We focus on the role of the European Parliament and explain why the Commission, the Council, and increasingly the Parliament, delegated decision-making to the Commission. If they chose delegation, they still have to determine under which institutional rule comitology should operate. These rules, too, distribute power unequally among actors and therefore raise the question of how they came about in the first place and whether and how the “losers” of a rule change seek to alter the rules at a later point in time.

This book provides a broad overview of the main trends in mass attitudes towards domestic politics and European integration from the 1970s until today. Particularly in the last two decades, the ‘end of the permissive consensus’ around European integration has forced analysts to place public opinion at the centre of their concerns. The book faces this challenge head on, and the overview it provides goes well beyond the most commonly used indicators. On the one hand, it shows how integration's deepening and enlargement involved polities and societies whose fundamental traits in terms of political culture — regime support, political engagement, ideological polarization — have remained anything but static or homogeneous. On the other hand, it addresses systematically what Scharpf (1999) has long identified as the main sources of the democratic deficits of the EU: the lack of a sense of collective identity, the lack of a Europe-wide structure for political accountability, and the lack of recognition of the EU as a legitimate political authority. In other words, it focuses on the fundamental dimensions of how Europeans relate to the EU: identity (the sense of an ‘European political community’; representation (the perception that European elites and institutions articulate citizens' interests and are responsive to them); and policy scope (the legitimacy awarded to the EU as a proper locus of policy-making). It does so by employing a cohesive theoretical framework derived from the entire IntUne project, survey and macro-social data encompassing all EU member countries, and state-of-the-art methods.

The European Union's effort to create a single market involves the removal of trade barriers created by divergent national standards and regulations, which need to be reconciled to promote market access and inter‐state commerce. This book provides a comprehensive account of the regulatory strategies and institutional arrangements adopted by the European Union in promoting the single market. It provides a historical overview and detailed case studies of the various regulatory initiatives that have altered the boundaries between the public and private sector in fostering market integration. Efforts to remove non‐tariff barriers to trade have relied heavily on European case law, and this book argues that the European Court of Justice has actively shaped markets by balancing the goals of market liberalization and market governance, while also fostering legal compliance with stated regulatory objectives.

Although markets are absolutely dependent on public authority, the book demonstrates how the EU has innovatively used non‐state actors to set standards for market access. By delegating regulatory responsibility to private standards‐setting bodies, a hybrid model of regulation has emerged that draws on private sector resources to achieve regulatory goals, primarily by establishing minimum thresholds for regulatory standards and related testing and certification practices. Expected to be more effective than the time‐consuming and ultimately limited harmonization of national practices, completion of the single market through principles of ‘mutual recognition’ and standard setting has been difficult to achieve. The effectiveness of this regulatory process in promoting market integration, and its impact on European business, are examined in detail. Throughout the book, comparisons are made with American efforts to remove internal trade barriers to demonstrate the difficulties of constructing a single market, and to highlight that both cases have involved public and private efforts to coordinate standards. Many of the strategies undertaken by the EU echo earlier American market‐building efforts.

The book sets out to examine the processes by which Europeanization takes place. Europeanization is defined as the process by which the key decisions about public policies are gradually transferred to the European level (or for new policy areas, emerge at the European level). This is in contrast to definitions of Europeanization which focus on the adaption of member states to European public policies. Thus, the main focus is whether a European Union ‘policy-making state’ is being created via changes in the distribution of power between member states and the European level institutions over time. In addition to several overview chapters (such as on agenda setting in the EU), there are twelve sectoral studies which analyse the differing trajectories and outcomes of the Europeanization process and the extent to which the European Union can make ‘authoritative allocations’. The case studies have been selected in order to illustrate the degree of cross-sectoral variation in the process of Europeanization, from sectors which have yet to see very much Europeanization, such as health, to sectors such as competition policy which are almost fully Europeanized. The book is consciously multi-theoretic in its approach, drawing on a range of theories and concepts, from theories of European integration, to theories of public policy processes.

As the traditional mode of coordinating — essentially issuing regulation — no longer commands sufficient political support, the EU has turned to what are increasingly termed soft or ‘new’ modes of governance, which rely upon different actors working together in relatively non-hierarchical networks. New modes of governance are in vogue because they appear to provide the EU with a new way to add value to national level activities without the slow process of agreeing new legislation or the cost associated with building new administrative capacities in Brussels. This analysis provides the first book-length account of the effectiveness of network-based modes at addressing problems that simultaneously demand greater horizontal and vertical coordination. Taking as an example the thirty-year struggle to build environmental thinking into all areas and levels of EU policy making, it systematically explores the steps that two major EU institutions (the European Commission and the European Parliament), and three member states (Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK) have (not) taken to build effective networked governance. By blending state of the art theories with new empirical findings, it offers a stark reminder that networked governance is not and has never been a panacea. Coordinating networks do not spontaneously ‘self organize’ in the EU; they have to be carefully designed as part of a repertoire of different coordinating instruments. The book concludes that the EU urgently needs to devote more of its time to the more mundane but important task of auditing and managing networks, which, paradoxically, is an exercise in hierarchy. In so doing, this book helps to strip away some of the rhetorical claims made about the novelty and appeal of new modes, to reveal a much more sober and realistic appraisal of their coordinating potential.