EUROPEAN RESEARCH RELOADED: COOPERATION AND INTEGRATION AMONG EUROPEANIZED STATES pot

His research interests include European integration and its effects on the member states, comparative politics and public policy, and the methodology of comparative research.. The first

AND INTEGRATION AMONG EUROPEANIZED STATES

COOPERATION

The titles published in this series are listed at the end of this volume.

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COOPERATION AND

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About the contributors vii

1 Introduction: Cooperation and Integration among Europeanized

States - Markus Haverland and Ronald Holzhacker 1

2 Beyond the Goodness of Fit: A Preference-based Account of

Europeanization - Ellen Mastenbroek and Mendeltje van Keulen 19

3 Framing European Integration in Germany and Italy: Is the EU

Used to Justify Pension Reforms? - Sabina Stiller 43

89

II European Integration - Integration and Cooperation among

Europeanized States

6 The Europeanization of Central Decision Makers’ Preferences

Concerning Europe: a Perpetual Motion? - Femke van Esch

7 Domesticated Wolves? Length of Membership, State Size and

Luitwieler

8 Beyond the Community Method: Why the Open Method of

Schäfer

Europeanization of Regulatory Policy in Denmark - Morten

Preferences at the European Convention - Dirk Leuffen and Sander

Coordination was Introduced to EU Policy-making - Armin

v

119

Party Functions - Harmen A Binnema

I Europeanization of the Member States - Beyond Goodness

of

5 Aggregating, Mobilizing and Recruiting: EU Integration and

4 Explaining EU Impacts at the Domestic Level – The

Fit

151

179

van Munster and Steven Sterkx

11 Sovereignty Reloaded? A constructivist Perspective on

European Research – Tanja E Aalberts

Migration Policy and the Boundaries of the European Union - Rens ng Mobility: The Externalization of European

III Conceptual Challenges - Territory, Governance and

Changing Notions of Sovereignty

9 European Integration and Unfreezing Territoriality: The Case of

the European Health Card - Hans Vollaard

1 Governi0

203

229

251

Dr Ronald Holzhacker is Assistant Professor for political science at the

University of Twente and Fellow at University College Utrecht in the Netherlands He is broadly interested in the impact of the European Union

on national democratic processes in the member states He is published in such journals as Party Politics, European Union Politics, and the Journal of Legislative Studies He is most recently editor, with Erik Albaek, of Democratic Governance and European Integration: Linking Societal and State Processes of Democracy (Edward Elgar, forthcoming 2006) In 2005

he is Visiting Professor at the University of Paris 1, Sorbonne and is a

2005-2006 recipient of the Jean Monnet Fellowship to the European University Institute, Florence He holds a PhD from the University of Michigan and a J.D from the University of Minnesota Law School

Dr Markus Haverland is Lecturer in Public Administration at the

Faculty of Social Sciences, Leiden University His research interests include European integration and its effects on the member states, comparative politics and public policy, and the methodology of comparative research He

Science at the University of Konstanz and took his doctorate at the University of Utrecht He has been a Jean Monnet Fellow at the Robert Schuman Center, European University Institute (Florence), and Postdoc and Lecturer at the University of Nijmegen

Policy and West European Politics He graduated in Public Administration has published in the Journal of Public Policy, the Journal of Europen Social

NOTES ON THE CONTRIBUTORS

Tanja E Aalberts is a PhD student at the Department of Political

Science, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, The Netherlands and is currently completing her doctoral thesis on sovereignty discourses in the context of EU-Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa She holds an MA in International Relations and International Law (University of Twente, The Netherlands) and an MScEcon in International Relations Theory (University of Wales, Aberystwyth) She has recently published in the Journal of Common Market Studies 42(1), 2004

Harmen A Binnema is a Ph.D candidate at the Department of Political

Science, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam His dissertation is on the impact of

EU integration on the organization and ideology of national political parties Other research interests include Europeanization, legitimacy, and governance He recently contributed a chapter on the Netherlands in a volume on the OECD and national welfare states, edited by Klaus Armingeon and Michelle Beyeler and published by Edward Elgar, 2004

Femke A.W.J van Esch is an Assistant Professor at the Utrecht School

of Governance in the Netherlands She is writing a thesis on the formation of national preferences concerning the establishment of the European Economic and Monetary Union She has, with others, published ‘Defining National Preferences The Influence of Inter-national Non-State Actors’ in:

B Arts, M Noortmann, B Reinalda (eds.), Non-State Actors in International Relations, Aldershot, Ashgate 2001 and ‘Why States Want EMU Developing a Theory on National Preferences’ in: A Verdun (ed.) The Euro European Integration Theory and Economic and Monetary Union, Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield 2003

Dr Morten Kallestrup is assistant prof essor in public policy and

administration at the University of Aalborg, Denmark, and visiting research fellow at the Danish Institute for International Affairs (DIIS) He has conducted research on how the EU impacts on domestic regulatory policies, in particular on the role of domestic politics in processes of Europeanization His general research interests include Europeanization of domestic politics and policies, regulatory policy, and the study of ‘politics versus markets’ in Europe He has published books and articles on Europeanization, regulatory policy-making, and tax policy, as well as co-authored a volume for The Danish Power and Democracy Study in 2004

Mendeltje van Keulen is a fellow at the Clingendael European Studies

Programme and and PhD student at the Centre for European Studies, University of Twente She holds Master’s degrees in European public administration from the University of Twente and the College of Europe, Bruges and is completing her dissertation concerning the effectiveness of Dutch EU policies Her research interests include EU policy-making and co-ordination at the domestic level; the Europeanisation of public administration and EU decision making Recent publications include: Keulen, M van (2004), ‘What Happens at Home, Negotiating EU-Policy at the Domestic Level’, in: Meerts, P and F Cede (eds.), Negotiating European Union, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan

Ellen Mastenbroek graduated with honours in Political Science and

Public Administration at the University of Nijmegen, the Netherlands She is doing PhD research at Leiden University on the transposition of European directives in the Netherlands Other research interests include quantitative and qualitative methods of political science, Europeanization, international relations, and neo-institutionalism She has recently published an article in European Union Politics on the transposition of EU directives in the Netherlands

Sander Luitwieler is a Ph.D student at the Department of Public

Administration, Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands His Ph.D research is on the role of member states and EU institutions during IGC negotiations resulting in EU Treaties, particularly the Treaty of Nice His research interests concern the European integration process in general and

EU Treaty formation in particular Publication: Luitwieler, Sander and Pijpers, Alfred (2006), ‘The Netherlands: From Principles to Pragmatism’, in: Laursen, Finn (ed.), The Treaty of Nice Actor Preferences, Bargaining and Institutional Choice, Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers

Dirk Leuffen works as a researcher in the European Politics team of the

Center for Comparative and International Studies at the ETH Zürich In addition, he is a PhD candidate at the University of Mannheim In his dissertation, he analyses French European policy-making in the context of divided government His research interests include the analysis of political decision-making, the interactions between domestic politics and foreign policy-making, European Union and French politics His work is published, among other places, in the British Journal of Political Science

Dr Rens van Munster studied European Integration and International

Relations at the University of Twente, the Netherlands He holds a degree from the Department of Political Science, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, where he wrote his doctoral thesis on European security

PhD-Dr Armin Schäfer is researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the

Study of Societies, Cologne, Germany Current research interests include: the history and political economy of European integration, international economic policy coordination, comparative politics, and social policy Latest publication: ‘A New Form of Governance? Comparing the Open Method of Coordination to Multilateral Surveillance by the IMF and the OECD’, Journal of European Public Policy, forthcoming

Steven Sterkx holds a graduate degree in Political and Social Sciences

and a European Master’s degree in Human Rights and Democratization As a Ph.D candidate for the Fund for Scientific Research (Flanders), he is currently doing research at the Department of Politics, University of Antwerp, Belgium His Ph.D research concerns the asylum and migration policy of the European Union, and in particular its external dimension A recent publication is ‘The comprehensive approach off balance: externalization of EU asylum and migration policy’, in PSW Paper, 2004/4, Antwerp: University of Antwerp

Sabina Stiller is a junior researcher and PhD candidate at the

Department of Political Science, Radboud University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands She holds a B.A in European Studies and Spanisch and a M.A

in International Relations Her research interests include social policy change (both at domestic and EU-level), path-breaking welfare state reform, political leadership and the impact of political ideas In her Ph.D project, she looks at explanations for recent structural reforms of the German welfare state She has written ‘Germany and the Turkish wish to join the EU: Get them in or keep them out?’ Jason Magazine 28 (1), 2003

and immigration In 2003-2004, he was a Marie Curie Fellow in International Political Community at the Department of International Politics, University of Wales, Aberystwyth He has published an article in the International Journal for the Semiotics of Law

Hans Vollaard is junior lecturer and co-ordinator of the EU-studies

program in the Faculty of Arts, and a Ph.D candidate in the Department of Political Science at Leiden University, the Netherlands He studied political science in Leiden between 1995 and 1999 His research project deals with political territoriality and European integration in the policy areas of healthcare and security In 2005, he co-authored and co-edited a volume on euroscepticism in the Netherlands

The Three Waves of European Research

European cooperation and integration has continued to progress forward over the past five decades, with an ever deepening impact on the member states The first wave of research into these processes concerned European integration, the process of institution building and policy developments at the European Union (EU) level The second wave, on Europeanization used integration as an explanatory factor in understanding domestic political change and continuity related to the EU What is now necessary is to link our understanding of these ‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’ processes of integration

and Europeanization in the EU

This book argues that a third wave of research on the EU is needed

to adequately understand the increased interconnectedness between the European and national political levels We posit that this third wave should

be sensitive to the temporal dimension of European integration and Europeanization In particular, we seek to link the processes of European integration and Europeanization in a new way by asking the question: how has Europeanization affected current modes of integration and cooperation in the EU?

Part I Europeanization of the Member States Preparing the ground for

the third wave, the first part of the book concerns Europeanization In order

to fully understand the feedback of Europeanization on cooperation and integration it is important to analyze how European integration has had an impact on member states in the first place, in particular indirectly, beyond the direct mechanism of compliance with European policies The research presented here stresses the role which domestic actors and in particular national governments have in utilizing indirect mechanisms to their advantage, hence guiding the Europeanization impact on the member states

Part II European Integration The second part of the book concerns

integration and cooperation, in line with what we see as the third wave of research Here we analyze how prior integration effects, that is Europeanization, influences current preferences for integration We find that earlier integration effects have had a significant influence on those preferences This has resulted, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, not always in a preference for closer integration, but instead for new forms of looser cooperation between the member states

Part III Conceptual Challenges The multi-faceted interrelationships

between the EU level and the national level and the increased interconnectedness between them, cast doubt on the appropriateness of traditional readings of central concepts of political science and international relations such as territory, identity and sovereignty The final section of the book therefore concerns the conceptual challenges faced by the continued development of multi-level governance These contributions show that a

xi

conceptual reorientation is necessary because up until now these concepts have been almost exclusively linked to the nation state

One of the key findings of the book is the astonishing variation in modes

of cooperation and integration in the EU We suggest that this variation can

be explained by taking into account the sources of legitimacy at the national level and at the EU level on which cooperation and integration are based

We argue that whereas economic integration, in particular the creation of a single market, could be sufficiently backed by output legitimacy, deeper integration in other areas requires a degree of input legitimacy that is currently lacking in the EU Therefore, non-economic integration is often taking forms of looser types of cooperation, such as the open method of coordination and benchmarking, allowing domestic actors more control over the Europeanization of these policies onto the member state We elaborate

on this speculation in the conclusion and believe that it should be part of the future research agenda of the third wave of European research

About the European Research Colloquium

This book emerged from the European Research Colloquium (ERC) of the Netherlands Institute of Government (NIG), which was founded by the editors of this volume in 2002 A small group of researchers from the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, and Denmark met every six months over the past three years to debate substantive topics, the choice of research design and methodology, and, in particular, the empirical research presented

by each author in this book

The ERC offers secondary mentoring to PhD students researching and writing on topics related to the European Union and European comparative politics During each two-year period, a small group of 14-16 PhD students meet twice a year to discuss their comparative European and EU research with senior scholars from NIG NIG is a network of eight political science and public administration departments from Universities across the Netherlands

The ERC has the following objectives:

• Improve the quality of EU and European comparative PhD dissertations

by focusing attention on research design, methodology, and theoretical innovation of the students’ research

• Build a cohort of young researchers stretching across Europe to build the next generation of comparative scholars who will know and cooperate with one another now and in the future

• Create a book length manuscript, consisting of chapters written by each PhD participant, to share the results of the colloquium with the broader academic community

The five 3-day conferences of the group were held at Erasmus University Rotterdam, the University of Twente, University of Nijmegen, University of Utrecht (University College Utrecht and the Utrecht School of Governance), and for the final meeting we returned to Rotterdam

The following senior scholars met with the PhD students in small groups

to discuss their research with them during our meetings at the different member institutions of the Netherlands Institute of Government We extend our gratitude and thanks to them The students greatly benefited from their wisdom and advice

We thank Tanja Börzel, Peter Geurts, Henk van der Kolk, Andre Krouwel, Bob Lieshout, Sebastiaan Princen, Frans van Waarden, Jaap de Wilde, Bertjan Verbeek, and Kutsal Yesilkagit

We would also like to thank the NIG for their encouragement and guidance in launching the colloquium, including the previous management team at the University of Twente, Jacques Thomassen, Oscar van Heffen, Herman Lelieveldt, Marcia Clifford and Marie-Christine Prédéry, as well as the present one at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, Christopher Pollitt, Sandra van Thiel, and Vicky Balsem

Ronald Holzhacker and

Markus Haverland

European integration has come along way since early visionaries such as Jean Monnet set forth the basic idea of Europe The three communities formed in the immediate post-war period, the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC, 1951), the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom, 1957), and the European Economic Community (EEC, 1957), were limited both in the scope of their supranational decision-making and the resulting impact onto the member states More recent integration efforts, those memoralized in the Single European Act (1986) and the treaties of Maastricht (1993), Amsterdam (1999), and Nice (2000), established the basis for intensive intergovernmental and supranational decision making in a whole range of policy areas This evolving process of European integration has had a deep, although varied, impact on the member states

However, the process of integration and Europeanization has not continued uniformly over the past decades There appears to have been a dramatic change in the relationship between the EU and its member states in the late 1980s and early 1990s This is a time which corresponds to the fundamental completion of the Single Market and the dramatic developments in Central and Eastern Europe

“The decade from 1985 to 1995 was a watershed in the political development of the EU, for it introduced more intense public scrutiny of European decision-making, more extensive interest group mobilization, and less insulated elite decision-making The period beginning with the Single European Act and culminating with the decision to establish economic and monetary union created the conditions for politicized-participatory decision making in the EU by increasing the stakes of political conflict, broadening the scope of authoritative decision making, opening new avenues of group influence, and creating incentives for a quantum increase in political mobilization.” (Hooghe and Marks, 2001: 126)

This political development has intensified the interconnectedness between the EU and the national level, a phenomenon now widely referred

to as multi-level governance (Hooghe and Marks 2001, Kohler-Koch 2003), that has raised – among other things – new concerns about the democratic legitimacy of the European project It is our conviction that the intensified interaction necessitates bringing the two major strands of research on the European Union together, both the European integration (bottom-up) and the Europeanization of the member states (top-down) perspectives There have been considerable efforts to explain these processes individually This book seeks to begin to consider how these two processes can be seen as systematically related processes theoretically and explored through empirical research The idea is to begin to have a greater appreciation for the development

1

© 2006 Springer Printed in the Netherlands

R Holzhacker and M Haverland, (eds.), European Research Reloaded: Cooperation

and Integration among Europeanized States, 1-17

of multi-level governance over time, as a kind of cork-screw rotating continuously with top-down and bottom-up processes of interaction between levels of governance

We see this book as being at the turning point towards a new third wave

of research on the EU The first wave concerned European integration, the process of institution building and policy developments at the EU level Most of the early thinking in this area was done from an international relations perspective, discussing the interaction of the member states Later thinking on integration concentrated further on the development of the EU institutions themselves, and involved a wide range of perspectives from institutional thinkers, legal scholars, economists, and policy analysts (Haas

1957, Lindberg and Scheingold 1971, Moravscik 1999, Stone Sweet and Sandholtz 1998)

The second wave of research, on the Europeanization of the member states, gained prominence a decade ago and has since exploded with great vigor This research direction uses EU integration as an explanatory factor

in understanding domestic political change and continuity Here the comparativists came to the fore and sought to compare the impact which the

EU and European integration has on the domestic politics of the member states (Cowles, Risse, and Carporaso 2001; Featherstone and Radaelli 2003; Goetz and Hix 2001, Mény, Muller and Quermonne 1996) Though the scholars of the second wave have been able to identify factors and mechanisms that shape the adaptation and non-adaptation of the member states to the European Union, there are still open questions, in particular with regard to mechanisms at work that are more indirect than the direct pressure

of institutional compliance enforced by the Commission and the European Court of Justice Therefore, the first section of the book moves beyond the

‘goodness of fit’ explanations by focussing on indirect mechanisms such as changing opportunity structures and framing It is likely that member states have not always been aware of these indirect effects of European integration when they decided to delegate competencies to the EU level in the past This shape member states preferences towards further cooperation and integration

It is therefore important for the focus of this book to analyze these indirect effects in greater detail

Building on the knowledge concerning the significance of the indirect mechanisms, the book then turns to the third wave of research Here the book draws on the traditional strength of comparative politics and international relations Some theoretical work has just begun to call for ways to combine bottom-up theories of integration with the top-down theories of European- ization Börzel states that “a comprehensive understanding of the relationship between the member states and the European Union requires the systematic integration of the two dimensions,” although she then proceeds to “mainly

might have led to unexpected Europeanization experiences which now

dis- adopt a top-down perspective” (2005) Börzel and Risse have alsocussed the two perspectives and then state “As far as the European Union

concerned, we will get a more comprehensive picture if we study the feedback processes among and between the various levels of European, national, and subnational governance,” but then again take a ‘top-down’ perspective (Börzel and Risse, 2003: 57) In the same volume, Wincott states that “In the final analysis research on Europeanization should filter back into our understanding of what the European Union is (on an abstract level) and might even influence the process of European integration itself.” (2003: 282) We try here to move this debate further

There are of course reasons, especially critical in empirical research, to restrict oneself to either a bottom-up or top-down approach to research on the EU and the member states If both the dependent variable and the independent variable are changing at the same time, any hope of isolating causal factors is lost But if we truly want to ‘understand the nature of the beast’ (Risse-Kappen 1996), the evolving multi-level political system of the

EU and the member states, we must also acknowledge the interactive processes that feed back onto themselves

We argue that it is possible to circumvent the problem by separating Europeanization and European integration chronologically In other words

to take a temporal approach and by explicitly asking – how has the Europeanization experience impacted on (the preferences for) modes of cooperation and integration among the member states? We suggest three mechanisms which drive European integration and cooperation forward: socialisation, path dependency, and learning Before we elaborate on these mechanisms, we turn to the first section of our book dealing with the Europeanization of member states

EUROPEANIZATION OF THE MEMBER STATES

The focus of the book is on the turning point toward the third wave This implies that we still need to revisit some issues of the second wave before

we are able to move to the third wave The reason being that in order to analyze the question whether and how earlier Europeanization has affected (national preferences for) current modes of cooperation and integration it is necessary to have a good understanding of the extent to which the EU has impacted on the member states and the underlying mechanisms at work.1 So far, many studies have focused on the goodness of fit between European requirements and the national status quo as an explanation for domestic

1 There are many different usages of the term Europeanisation (for overviews, see Eising

2002, Olsen 2002, Radaelli 2002) Europeanisation is here broadly defined as the effect of European integration on the member states European integration is characterised by two interrelated processes “the delegation of policy competencies to the supranational level to achieve particular policy outcomes; and the establishment of a new set of political institutions; with executive, legislative and judicial powers” (Hix and Goetz, 2000: 3)

is

policy change However, empirical research has documented that the degree

of Europeanization is not simply a function of the goodness of fit It is true that at least some misfit is necessary for any adjustment to EU requirements

to take place: without misfit, adjustment is not logically possible But it is not true that misfit is a necessary condition for (any) domestic change caused

by the EU As the case of the French transport policies in the 1990s illustrates, EU induced domestic change is possible even if there is a close fit between EU objectives and national status quo, if this change is divergent from EU objectives (Knill and Lehmkuhl 2002: 261-2) This is a process that has been called ‘retrenchment’ (Börzel and Risse 2003)

Apart from this conceptual issue, it has been demonstrated that the explanatory power of the goodness of fit hypotheses is rather weak The hypotheses that the larger the misfit, the less adjustment observed, has not been sufficiently supported by empirical research Hence in many instances

no adjustments occurred even in case of low misfit, while adjustment has taken place in cases of relatively large misfit (see for instance Haverland

2000, Knill and Lenschow 1998) The contributions in this section therefore

go beyond the goodness of fit explanation by focusing on political preferences and indirect mechanism of Europeanization, in particular on changing opportunity structures and the framing of discourses

Changing opportunity structures The establishment of a new set of institutions at the European level with legislative, executive and judicial powers provides actors with a new layer of access to political decision making The EU creates new exit, veto, and informational opportunities for domestic actors resulting in a redistribution of powers and resources of public and private actors in the member states (Hix and Goetz 2002, see also Börzel and Risse 2003; Knill and Lehmkuhl 2002) For instance, the single market increases the leverage of export-oriented business at the expense of import-competing firms (see for the general argument Keohane and Milner 1996) and arguably also the power of business interest association vis-à-vis the representatives of diffuse interests, such as the environment (Kohler-Koch 1996)

Framing The other indirect mechanism refers to the cognitive impact of European integration and issues of framing European integration may alter the beliefs and expectations of domestic actors within a given opportunity structure shaping their preferences and strategies European integration may even lead to cognitive convergence, for instance about the appropriate mode

of governance (Börzel and Risse 2003, Kohler-Koch 2002, Knill and

Lehmkuhl 2002; Radaelli 2000)

We now turn from this general discussion of the possible causal mechanisms for Europeanization to the empirical research in this volume The first section of the book begins with a contribution by Mastenbroek and Van Keulen that gives a comprehensive criticism of the notion of goodness

of fit and than provides an alternative theory arguing that the fate of European policies depends on government preferences rather then the goodness of fit

They chose two cases from the Netherlands, the transposition of the 1998 gas directive and the transposition of the Biotech directive, which allow them to test both explanations in a competitive fashion

Next Stiller focuses more explicitly on the two indirect mechanisms elaborated above and analyses whether EU related arguments have been used

to justify change in welfare state arrangements She looks in particular at pension reform and employs a most similar system design, selecting Germany and Italy, two countries with similar pension systems and problems and a comparable number of veto players

In a similar vein, Kallestrup combines the mechanisms of framing and changing opportunity structures and asks to what extent and how Danish politicians and other actors make use of the EU in policy-making processes

at the domestic level Using the technique of process tracing, he looks in particular whether Danish politicians have conceived and assessed EU policies at the domestic level and how they made use of EU policies and pressure to justify reforms to competition law and consumer protections laws

in their country

We now turn from our attention on policies to political parties There is a certain bias in the Europeanization literature to study the effect of the EU on domestic policies, rather than on input processes such as cleavages, parties, and patterns of democratic legitimization (Hix and Goetz 2000: 15) However, in order to assess to what extent the Member States have Europeanized it is also important to evaluate whether and to what extent the

EU had an effect beyond policies (political output) Binnema deals with one

of the most important mass-elite linkage institutions in democracies, political parties He analyses whether the EU had an effect on the three most important functions of political parties: aggregation, mobilization and recruitment He does this for three different periods: around 1970, 1985 and

2000, first of all by comparing the 15 member states on a more general level with other OECD countries, and then by analyzing in greater detail The Netherlands, Denmark and Austria

EUROPEAN INTEGRATION AND COOPERATION

Moving from the second wave to the third wave, the second section of the book deals with the question whether and how Europeanization has in turn an effect on (the preferences for) future cooperation It is important to note that our approach should not be conflated with neo-functionalist reasoning To be sure, our attempt to link Europeanization and integration

might sound reminiscent of the feedback loops and spill-over effects of the much criticized neo-functionalist approach Neo-functionalism conceived integration as moving forward from its own dynamic, albeit in fits and starts (Haas 1958; Mitrany 1966, Schmitter 1969) Integration was to occur through two kinds of ‘spillover’, functional and political Whereas functional spillover referred to the interconnectedness of various economic processes with other societal processes and between issue areas, political spillover referred to how supranational organizations tend to generate a self-reinforcing process of institution building

But here we are not predicting a specific outcome In particular, we do not posit that there is a process toward an ever closer European Union Taking a historical perspective on the development of the EU does not automatically lead to a specific expectation about the possible outcome (Schmitter 2002) The scope of governance and the level where decisions are reached in a multi-level system can ‘contract as well as expand’ (Hooghe and Marks 2004: 5) It also does not imply a particular causal mechanism at work The Europeanization experience might feedback in various ways and with various effects Below three different mechanisms are discussed drawing from insights from international relations and comparative politics Socialization Taking a sociological institutionalist perspective, one can hypothesize that over time member states have been socialized into European norms and have developed a European identity which results in a shared “European” understanding of interests, the problems at stake, and legitimate and workable solutions (Checkel 1999; March and Olsen 1989)

In a similar vein Falkner argues “…preference formation is not necessarily exogenous to European integration…we cannot adequately understand EU treaty reform (and, indeed, European integration more generally) if we exclude instances of EU-level socialization and the institutionalization of policy paradigms” (2002, p 8) This mechanism implies further integration Path dependency It is also possible to take an actor-oriented rational choice approach while being sensitive to the temporal dimension of politics

An actor-oriented historical institutionalist perspective would lead us to again hypothesize ever closer integration as policy makers are increasingly constrained by the legacy of consequences of earlier effects of European integration which were often unforeseen and beyond their control (Pierson 1996) Likewise, Kohler-Koch argues that the effect of the deepening of earlier integration has increased the costs of non-decisions (Kohler-Koch 1996: 302)

Learning It may also be the case, however, that the current situation represents a critical juncture, a time at which it is possible to deviate from well-trodden paths In addition, as attempts of cooperation moves into new areas, the path dependency argument is not likely to be applicable Governments may desire more room to maneuver in dealing with experiences with European integration In weighting the costs and benefits of various alternatives of cooperation and integration, member states might

learn from past experiences of unexpected, indirect Europeanization beyond their control, and thus might now be more cautious when opting for supra-national modes of integration

As research on these mechanisms in the context of the EU is still in its infancy, we will not predict which of these mechanisms is dominant However, the book is based on the assumption that the member states themselves have been transformed in the process of European integration, resulting in a change of preferences toward what they desire at the EU level and how the central institutions of the EU should develop further

This second section of the book begins with a chapter by Van Esch focusing on the preferences of the German and French heads of government and ministers of finance concerning the establishment of a European economic and monetary union Using cognitive mapping she analyses in particular their world views related to EMU She analyzes the 1970s and the 1990s which allows her to compare periods with low and high degrees of European integration She analyses whether and to what extent earlier effects of European integration have become part of their ‘cognitive map’

Turning from the impact of earlier integration effects on the world view

of (members of ) governments to its impact on revealed government preferences, Leuffen and Luitwieler study whether the length of membership

in the EU impacts on member states’ preferences with regard to five crucial issues during the European Convention They argue that due to socialisation, older members will favour a more integrationist (or supra-national) institutional design, while new members are more in favour of a design safeguarding their national interests They test their sociological institutionalist argument against a hypotheses derived from rational choice institutionalism This hypothesis states that the size of the country explain its preference with regard to these issues The authors look at the preferences of all 25 members

of the convention and test their hypotheses quantitatively

While Leuffen and Luitwieler take length of EU membership as a proxy for the experience of earlier integration effects, Schäfer analyses more concretely a sequence of Europeanization and new modes of cooperation Taking an actor-oriented historical institutionalist approach that takes into account government preferences and learning effects, he seeks to explain why the open method of coordination (OMC) was introduced to EU policy making The OMC is a – currently much discussed – alternative to the traditional community method He analyzes to what extent and how the effects of prior integration, in particular EMU, have limited available choices in the area of employment policy and later in other socio-economic policy areas

CONCEPTUAL CHALLENGES

Overall, the chapters of the book document an increased interrelationship between the EU level and the domestic level This in turn has implications for the reconfiguration of political power and rule internally within, but also

externally outside the European Union In an attempt to address the latter

issue, the third wave of European studies calls for a renewed exploration of the way scholars in EU-studies have traditionally imagined the concepts of identity, boundaries and order through the lens of sovereign states The book therefore concludes with a conceptual reorientation

In a sense, then, the third wave of EU-studies reopens for consideration the concerns of the first wave of theorists, who explicitly dealt with issues of sovereignty, identity, and territoriality For instance, functionalists like Mitrany (1966) expected territorial orders and identities to fade out in favor

of functional polities Neo-functionalists and federalists foresaw a supranational Euro-state divided into functional and territorial subunits, while realists and liberal intergovernmentalists assumed the nation state would remain However, this first wave of EU-studies effectively narrowed the question of sovereignty down to a simple yes or no answer, consistent with traditional international relations theory However, such an approach seems too coarse for analyses that seek to trace the more fine-grained changes in the meaning and significance of sovereignty in arresting the thinking about identity, boundaries and orders The subsequent studies of Europeanization have often taken boundaries between the EU and its member states and the EU and its environment for granted Thus, they cannot account for shifts in territorial rule and the changing nature of boundaries The third wave of EU studies should therefore put forward the conceptual and theoretical devices

to address the dynamic interplay between boundaries, identity and order Thus the final section of this volume on the next generation of EU-studies subsequently deals with the impact of European integration and Europeanization on internal boundaries (Vollaard), external boundaries (van Munster and Sterkx), and the guiding principle of Europe’s territorial order – sovereignty (Aalberts) Vollaard illustrates for the case of the European health card how the unfreezing of Member States’ borders may lead both to the political reconfiguration of member states and the European Union Van Munster and Sterkx evaluate the ways in which the externalisation of European migration policies exports the Union’s structures of governance beyond its member states Aalberts concludes the section with a social-constructivist argument on how European integration and Europeanization result in the changing meaning and significance of sovereignty

METHODOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS

Regardless of whether authors focus on the effect of the EU on the member states or the effect of previous instances of Europeanization on (preferences) for future integration, they all demonstrate both a high level of methodological reflection and rigor in method application to ensure valid and reliable results This methodological awareness is a response to recent claims that theoretical progress in EU studies should be matched with higher methodological consciousness (Andersen 2003; Anderson 2003; Haverland 2005)

The authors of the (comparative) case studies in this volume (Mastenbroeck/Keulen, Stiller, Kallestrup, Binnema, van Esch) are fully aware that the problem of (internal) validity looms large in small ‘n’ designs Therefore each of them follows a carefully constructed most similar systems design Cases are selected intentionally in a manner that ensures that potentially theoretically meaningful variables are held ‘constant’ to rule out that they confound the causal effect of the the independent variable in which the author is interested (Frendreis 1983; Lijphart 1971) At the same time the cases exhibit a maximum variation of the independent variable which prevents the problem of selection bias (King et al 1994) The author of the single historical case study (Schäfer), carefully identifies a number of observable implications from the two theories he studies and then proceeds through pattern-matching, taking into account the timing and sequences of events (Yin 1994)

In order to assess the overall impact of the European integration and Europeanization respectively, some case oriented researchers ask the counterfactual question: what would have happened in the domestic area of interest in the absence of the EU (see also Anderson 2003, Haverland 2003, 2005) This additional device to increase the internal validity is necessary as

it is difficult to establish the strength of causal effect of the European Union when focusing on indirect mechanisms Europeanization research is not always aware of this difficulty and generally suffers from a bias towards EU level explanations Domestic change and continuity is too quickly attributed

authors that use a quantitative large ‘n’ design (Leuffen and Luitwieler) therefore reflect in particular on concept validity which is often at risk when relatively ‘simple’ quantitative indicators have to be developed to test relatively complex theories

Regardless of the research design chosen all authors pay due notice to the issue of replicability and reliability They are all explicit about their hypotheses, their operationalization, the source of their data and the methods

of data analysis In order to avoid measurement errors and bias, they typically tap divergent sources in a triangulative fashion (King et al 1994; Yin 1994)

Large ‘n’ research has typically less problems with internal validity The

to the European Union; alternative explanations are not taken into account

CONCLUSION

In lieu of a separate chapter at the end of this volume, we would like to summarize our main results here First, we will emphasize the results that emerge from the rich empirical research of the chapters contained in the three sections of the book and indicate how this research has begun to answer our main question – how has Europeanization affected current modes

of integration and cooperation among the member states? Secondly, we will use our cork screw model to speculate as to why we think the modes of integration and cooperation may have changed over time This will lay out a fruitful area for future research

In the first section of the book on Europeanization, Mastenbroek and van Keulen have tested the dominant explanation of ‘goodness of fit’ for explaining policy change, against their own explanation based on government preferences Their results are in line with the preference-based explanation The Netherlands was in favor of the Gas directive and transposed it successfully, despite a large misfit, while the transposition of the unwanted Biotech directive was a failure, though here the misfit was much smaller or even non-existent Next, Stiller’s study on the framing of pension reform in Italy and Germany found that domestic actors in Italy used the EU to justify reforms, whereas actors in Germany did not use the EU in this way She points towards the general popularity of the EU as an important scope condition for framing to occur The Italian government could tap into a high level of support for the EU, whereas the German government could not

In line with the Italian pension case but contrary to the German case, Kallestrup finds for the case of Danish consumer and competition policy that domestic actors made intensive use of the changed opportunity structures afforded by the EU The domestic actors pointed to Europe even in the case

of national competition policy, even though no direct EU obligations exist in this policy area The EU was used as an argument for instance to prolong the decision-making process and to delimit the scope of the debate He also finds that the selective use of the EU as an argument is more important than

‘goodness of fit’ when explaining the reform of regulatory policy As in the Dutch case (Mastenbroek and van Keulen) the degree of misfit is not correlated with the degree of adaptation Finally, Binnema finds that the impact of the EU on parties is rather limited, arguing that the pressure for change is weak and that there are no strong mechanisms linking the national level and the EU Crucially, parties hardly refer to EU issues during national party competition and recruitment is still controlled by the national political parties European integration might have contributed to the trend of declining membership, however

This Europeanization research allows for the following conclusion: the goodness of fit between EU requirements and the national status quo does

not account for cross-national variation in adaptation to the EU Rather, the preferences of governments are a crucial factor Governments seem to utilize the indirect mechanisms to their own advantage More concretely: governments get their way by strategically and selectively using the new opportunity to frame a topic in a ‘European’ way

Turning to our next section on European integration and cooperation, van Esch’s chapter using cognitive mapping to compare the worldviews of domestic actors in the late 1960s with the late 1980s regarding EMU, provides support for the hypothesis that as European integration moves forward, the worldviews on which central decision-makers base their preferences have become more Europeanized Interestingly though, the inclusion of earlier EU integration effects in the cognitive map does not automatically lead to a pro-European stance The French president Georges Pompidou was strongly against the establishment of (true) EMU but his view

is more Europeanized (i.e more informed by past EU experiences) than that

of the pro-European advocate Valery Giscard d’Estaing This suggests that sometimes learning rather then socialisation mechanisms – as discussed earlier in this introduction are at work

speaking EU membership does socialize governments into a more European stance Their analysis with regard to crucial issues of the European Convention reveals that the length of membership impacts state preferences for further integration They conclude that the longer a country is a member

pro-of the EU, the more it is socialized into the EU and that this is reflected

in their preferences for the institutional design for integration More specifically, they found that long-standing members favor more democratic voting rights in the Council of Ministers based on population, whereas newer members favored institutional designs that emphasize the equality of states Their alternative explanation drawing from rational choice institutionalism that state-size determines preferences did not receive much empirical support

supported by the results of Schäfer’s study on the Open Method of Coordination He finds that the decision for the OMC is a result both of constraints set by EMU (hence an earlier instance of EU integration) and the political color of governments across the EU This indicates that not only the policy aims but also the mode of integration in the EU is impacted by prior integration Thus, while a conservative – liberal coalition at Maastricht created a mode of decision-making for fiscal and monetary policy in the EU

to constrain successive national governments, a social democratic majority at Amsterdam relied on soft law to promote its goals in employment and social policy By implication, this latter mode of integration avoided sovereignty losses for national governments, and helped maintain the control of national actors

–The results of Leuffen and Luitwieler suggest, however, that generally

That Europeanization is not always a question of socialization is however

The final section of the book turns to re-evaluate central concepts of EU studies and international relations as a result of the third wave of research linking bottom-up and top-down approaches Vollaard, in his research on healthcare, finds that multi-level governance is beginning to break down conceptions of territoriality in critical components of the social welfare state

by giving citizens the option of temporary exit to receive care abroad He writes that the conception of territoriality is then re-emerging at the EU level In contrast, Munster and Sterkx find that the EU’s externalization of migration policy, pushing policies out by encouraging countries which border on the EU to tighten border controls, constitutes a deterritorialized response to migration issues Finally, Aalberts finds that the constructivist perspective toward the mutual construction of structure and agency helps member states maintain the principle of sovereignty within the realities of multi-level governance structures

One of the general research findings of the book is the great importance

of national governments for understanding the link between Europeanization and subsequent modes of integration and cooperation Many contributions have shown that member state governments are capable of controlling the degree and type of Europeanization and are aware of future Europeanization effects when favoring certain EU decision modes over others

More specifically, Mastenbroek and van Keulen find the preferences of national political actors critical to the successful transformation of directives, and both Stiller and Kallestrup find national actors may creatively use arguments about the EU to press for domestic reforms Van Esch’s study suggest that the world view of governments has become more Europeanized, but that member states can learn different things from earlier instances of EU integration Schäfer shows how the political color of the majority of governments across the EU influences the mode of decision making chosen for new areas of integration and cooperation He explains that this is an attempt to steer the Europeanization impacts onto the member states and avoid a loss of sovereign decision-making Generally speaking, we found an effect of Europeanization on member-states preferences, but there were different mechanisms at work, sometimes in combination, by which member state governments were able to mediate this effect

The result of this decades long process of Europeanization and integration, and the continued development of multi-level governance, is the beginning of the de-territorialization of some decision-making at the national level This is shown by Vollaard for healthcare policy In some policy areas, for example in migration policy researched by Munster and Sterkx, decision-making has not only re-territorialized at the EU level, but the EU has begun

to push policies onto neighboring countries Finally, this deepening and integration in multi-level governance, continues to occur while the member states continue to view themselves as sovereign, a constructivist turn in the research undertaken by Aalberts

Now we turn to the speculative part of our conclusion, that moves beyond the research results presented here to lay out a fruitful area for future research One of the main results of the empirical research presented here is that there is not a development towards an ever-closer union in the way neo-functionalists originally imagined, but that national actors continue to play

a strong role in determining the degree of integration and cooperation and the resultant Europeanization impacts onto the member states The dual processes of European integration and Europeanization are thus not continuing in a single trajectory Europeanization does not automatically result in a single type of European integration driven forward primarily by the supranational institutions of the EU, but instead domestic actors continue

to play a strong role in deciding on the mode of integration and cooperation Now we ask, why has there been such a wide variety of modes of integration and cooperation over the decades long development of the European Union? Let us begin here with the model or heuristic device we briefly mentioned at the beginning of the introduction One way to conceive of the dual processes of Europeanization and European integration is to imagine a rotating cork-screw lying on its side Each upward rotation of the cork-screw represents a particular aspect of European integration, the subsequent movement downward represents the resulting impact on the member states – Europeanization

Early integration of the EC in the 1950s and 1960s, for example in Coal and Steel entailed minimal Europeanization impacts on the member states in one policy field The process though quickened and intensified through the 1970s and 1980s with increased integration and increased Europeanization, leading to the development of a multi-level system of governance Thus when we look at these dual processes over time it appears that although there are periods of faster and slower rotations, there has been a general trajectory since the earliest stages of the European project until the late 1980’s of successively faster rotations This represents increased activity for European integration and subsequent Europeanization impacts onto the member states This process was propelled forward by a general consensus, at least by the national actors in the governments in power at the time, that clear economic gains could be achieved by the creation of a single market and peace and stability on the continent could be achieved by a level of political integration

However, after the basic completion of the Single Market in the early 1990s, many of the newer forms of integration and cooperation look quite different than those in the earlier period It is as if the corkscrew has been profoundly transformed, and subsequent forward progress was splintered in different directions Some strands of the rotating corkscrew proceeded with

a high degree of integration and high Europeanization impacts That is the case, for example, for the creation of a single currency among 12 of the 15 countries (see chapter van Esch and also Schäfer) But other types of interaction among the member states have been through much looser forms

of cooperation, such as bench-marking and other forms of soft-cooperation between member states (see chapter Schäfer) Here one might imagine a thin line spiraling upwards, representing the agreement to discuss and cooperate, but only a dashed lined spiraling downward, representing the limited and voluntary impact back onto the member states of this degree of cooperation This represents looser types of integration and more minimal impacts of Europeanization Finally, we also note the increased use of pioneer groups within the EU, where only certain countries agree to cooperate and integrate their policies The Schengen agreement on border controls is an example of this Here we might imagine a dashed spiral line upwards toward the EU and

a similar one down again onto the member states, because only some EU countries agreed to this kind of cooperation and its subsequent impacts onto the state

We posit that whereas a quickening spiral of integration on the one hand and Europeanization on the other, characterized the period from the 1950’s through the goal of creating a single market in the late 1980’s, the lack of democratic legitimacy for the EU project has resulted in the trajectory of integration and Europeanization in the 1990’s to be quite different than earlier periods.2 The current period of cooperation and integration among Europeanized states is thus characterized by larger variation and generally looser types of cooperation which allow the member states a greater degree

of control over the impact of these policies on the member states – thus their Europeanization Some of these new forms of cooperation began earlier, but their use has now been extended to many more areas than before

We suspect that the distinction between input-oriented authenticity (government by the people) and output-oriented effectiveness (government for the people) is crucial to an understanding of the current modes of cooperation and integration among Europeanized states (Scharpf, 1999) Given clear overall economic gains of the single market program, output-oriented legitimacy was sufficiently high across Europe to propel the European project forward through the 1980’s Moreover, (economic)

“integration could largely be advanced by negative integration pushed by the Commission and the Court, as it were behind the back of politically legitimized actors” (Scharpf 1999: 71) Furthermore, in addition to output legitimacy, the EU likely also benefited from a general sense of input legitimacy nurtured by a feeling of belonging to the Western political community during the period of the Cold War and the provision of peace and stability However, the situation seems to have changed Since the creation of the

2 This is not to say that their was a strictly linear development towards deeper integration and stronger Europeanization during the first four decades of integration But this was certainly the general trend There was no large variation in the modes of integration and cooperation The community method was the prime mode of policy making

Single Market in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the mode of decision-

making in new areas, such as pensions and social security, unemployment, immigration , and security and defense, is quite different than earlier periods Decision making in the new policy areas is more likely to entail cooperation between the member states, rather than tight integration through the use of the community method In these policy areas, there are minimal, or at least not immediately obvious economic gains to integration Moreover, supra- national integration in these areas is more visible to the public and demand positive integration, hence explicit approval by the Council of Ministers and, increasingly, the European Parliament Thus, tacit approval

is no longer sufficient for forward progress to occur, instead an “action consensus is needed among a wide range of divergent national and group interests” (Scharpf 1999: 71) In addition, after the fall of the wall and the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, perhaps general input legitimacy from a sense of belonging to the Western political community has diminished For both reasons, nationally elected leaders need new sources of input-oriented legitimacy, at least for areas beyond economic and monetary policy where output legitimacy can be more easily secured

Given the lack of input legitimacy, it is likely that further cooperation and integration in non-economic areas can only be achieved through institutional means that allow national elites to better control, monitor, and evaluate the impact of proposals on their country and thus to better steer the process of Europeanization Thus the insufficient degree of input oriented legitimacy as decision-making moves from the single market project toward non-economic (positive) integration is a reason for the spiral of integration to

be splintering into many different modes New forms of cooperation, rather than integration, are emerging in the EU, such as benchmarking in socio-economic policy and enhanced cooperation in defense and security, which are more voluntary and less binding because there is a lack of legitimacy to

go further

It follows that only if we see an increase in the input legitimacy of the institutions at the EU level, fostered for example by a strengthening of the European Parliament or increasing the transparency of the decision-making within the Council of Ministers, can the kind of European integration pursued during the peak period of the European project be continued Without this input legitimacy, other types of decision-making involving cooperation in place of the community method will increasingly be used to give more time for national democratic processes to occur

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BEYOND GOODNESS OF FIT

Abstract: This paper is concerned with formulating and testing a preference-based

explanation of EU implementation The hypothesis is that, rather than the

‘goodness of fit’ with existing policies, the fit with national preferences predicts the ease of implementation of new EU legislation This hypothesis is tested by a focused comparison between two highly similar recent EU- directives in the Netherlands In line with the expectations, implementation

of the Biopatent directive, which the Netherlands voted against, turned out to

be highly problematic The Gas Directive, which the Netherlands pushed for vigorously, was implemented timely and correctly The analysis shows that there is an important scope condition for the hypothesis: as most member states will be internally divided about the preferences regarding new EU policy, the same actor should be involved during the phases of negotiations and implementation If this is not the case, sound co-ordination should take place between all stakeholders in order to facilitate implementation Contrary

to the rather static goodness of fit argument, this study makes clear that domestic actors’ estimate of the degree of fit with existing national legislation may differ considerably, and secondly, that domestic actors may purposely attempt to change the domestic status quo.

EU membership Europeanization research takes integration as an explanatory factor in understanding domestic political change and continuity A specific

Ellen Mastenbroek and Mendeltje van Keulen

1 Ellen Mastenbroek is assistant professor at the department of public administration, Radboud

Mendeltje van Keulen is research fellow at the Netherlands Institute for International Relations ‘Clingendael’.

University Nijmegen.

19

and Integration among Europeanized States, 19-42

© 2006 Springer Printed in the Netherlands

R Holzhacker and M Haverland, (eds.), European Research Reloaded: Cooperation

question in this ‘second wave’ has been how member states comply with EU policies Driven by the widespread political attention for the so-called implementation deficit of EU directives, various researchers have contemplated this issue from the late 1980s onwards Third and more recently, calls have been made to link the first and second stages so as to find out how experiences with Europeanization feed back into consecutive integration processes (Beyers and Trondal, 2003, 2)

If one assumes that member states try to upload their policies to the EU level with the aim of laying these down in binding EU legislation (Héritier

1995, 278), it follows that implementation depends on the ‘goodness of fit’ between the EU policy demands and existing national policies (Duina 1997; Knill and Lenschow 1998; Knill 2001; Green Cowles Caporaso and Risse 2000; Börzel and Risse 2003; Börzel 2003a) However, this hypothesis has been rejected on several occasions (Knill and Lenschow 1998, Héritier and Knill 2001; Haverland 2000; Treib 2003) It has been argued that at times member states want to change the status quo, and hence push for EU policies that go against their existing policies They may even use the EU as a leverage to get this done (Stiller and Kallestrup, this volume) For the same reason, member states may also easily adapt to misfitting EU policies In assuming that national decision-makers act as guardians of the status quo, the goodness of fit hypothesis thus is overly conservative In this chapter, we propose a more parsimonious explanation for implementation problems: member states’ preferences The hypothesis is that member states will ‘balk

at complying’ with decisions that do not ‘fit’ their national preferences, but smoothly implement much-wanted negotiating outcomes, even when these run counter to their status quo

In testing this hypothesis, a comparative case study is conducted The first case is the ‘Biopatent Directive’ (1988/44/EC) Whereas dead against it, the Netherlands, were unable to form a blocking minority in the Council of Ministers The second case concerns the so-called ‘First Gas Directive’ (98/30/EC), which the Netherlands pushed for vigorously Apart from the fit with Dutch preferences, these directives are quite similar as regards technical characteristics that influence the ease of implementation, which allows for a focused comparison The cases are explored with the help of process tracing, dossier analysis and qualitative interviews

European integration is claimed to be haunted by an implementation deficit (Weiler 1988, 340) From the late 1980s on, academics and EU officials have shared the view that the member states’ record for complying with EU policies is rather poor According to Metcalfe (1992, 117), this is one of the most pressing problems for the European Commission in seeking

to manage the European integration process Duina (1997, 155) even claims that ‘the inconsistent observance of laws by the member states has stood squarely in the way of unification’

The deficit first came to the fore during the process of internal market building in the late 1980s and early 1990s The objective of this undertaking, the development of a single European market for goods, services, capital, and people, was to be accomplished by means of an ambitious legislative program, comprising around 300 measures, mostly directives Whereas progress at the legislative stage was fairly impressive, the project seemed to grind to a halt at the desks of national civil servants and politicians Member states’ implementation of the new rules turned out to be far from smooth In

1991, less than a year before the agreed starting date, the transposition rate

of the twelve member states averaged 65 % A mere 24 directives had been transposed by all member states, which equaled one sixth of all the directives

in force at that time (Pelkmans 1991, 52)

Late and faulty implementation is problematic because it endangers the credibility and the effectiveness of EC law In the words of Internal Market Commissioner Bolkestein,‘delays in putting directives into effect cause enormous harm to businesses and to citizens’ (European Commission 2004) Moreover, implementation problems put a drain on the Commission’s scarce time and personnel, because investigating instances of alleged late or incorrect implementation is cumbersome and time-consuming

Since the early 1990s, the Commission has therefore taken to battle the deficit It started out quite cautiously, forming a committee led by former Commissioner Peter Sutherland to study the problem Yet over time it toughened its stance, shaking off its reputation for being ‘a pussycat when it comes to enforcement’ (Puchala 1975, 513) In doing so, it is aided by the European Court of Justice, which has become a fervent enforcer of EC law Its threat of legal action has become more and more of a dissuasion for prospective cheaters It especially gained momentum after its well-known

1991 Frankovich verdict, in which it affirmed the principle of financial liability of a Member State for late or improper transposition Yet ‘the failure

to transpose agreed directives (…) remains a focus for urgent attention’ (European Commission 1999, 13)

In line with the Commission, several students of European integration have sought to answer the intriguing question ‘why states fail to implement measures they have previously agreed upon in the context of the Council of Ministers’ (Mendrinou 1996, 4) The overall view is that the implementation deficit is endemic to the EU (Weiler 1988; From and Stava 1993; Knill and Lenschow 1998, 1350; Duina 1997, 155; Lampinen and Uusikylä 1998, 231;

Mendrinou 1996, 2; Grant Matthews and Newell, 2000 72; Glachant 2001, 1; Bursens2002, 173) and therefore worth studying.2

Originally, EU implementation problems were viewed as resulting from legal and administrative difficulties Starting with the work by Siedentopf and Ziller (1988), the focus was on legal and administrative problems which hampered implementation An advocate of this view is Demmke (2001, 15), who after the analysis of the EU legal acts in water policy concludes that implementation problems only rarely result from political resistance, but more so from organizational, legal, technical and financial causes This view

is upheld by Falkner et al (2005), who show that the bulk of infringements in the area of EU labor law have their roots in legal-administrative problems The literature suggests two types of legal-administrative factors that influence the ease of implementation First, problems are identified at the level of the member states, such as legal perfectionism (Dimitrakopoulos & Richardson 2001b), lack of financial or personnel resources (Ciavarini Azzi

2000, 57; Falkner et al., 2005), and the inefficiency of domestic political institutions (Lampinen and Uusikylä 1998, 240).3 Second, several factors at the level of individual directives play a part, such as the EU decision-making procedure (Ciavarini Azzi 2000, 56); the extent to which it introduces a new topic of EU regulation; the time period allotted for implementation; the legal instrument used for implementation; the complexity of implementation; the existence of Chinese Walls between negotiators and implementers of EU legislation and the number of governmental departments (Bekkers et al.,

1993, 197) involved (see Mastenbroek 2003, 376-279) However, in a quantitative study of transposition speed in the Netherlands, Mastenbroek (2003) has shown that such legal-administrative causes are only one side of the coin Transposition problems sometimes seem to be of a more political nature Two variants of this argument are present in the literature: the

‘goodness of fit’ hypothesis and the more general ‘domestic politics’ argument

2 Some authors take a slightly more skeptical view, claiming that the deficit is not too high and not endemic to the EU (Börzel, 2001, 804) Others argue that implementation problems are not special to the EU, but just as prevalent in national political systems (Peters, 1997, 189)

3 For a quantitative study on such country-level variables, see Mbaye (2001)

3.1 Goodness of fit

The bulk of recent Europeanization literature centers around the

‘goodness of fit’ The idea can be traced back to Héritier (1995, 278), who claims that member states seek ‘to impose their own institutional patterns on

EU policymaking because they wish to avoid costs of institutional adaptation and wish want to establish a level playing field for their own industry in European markets’ As follows from this assumption, a member state will have trouble adapting to the decision-making result if it is unsuccessful in uploading its national institutions and policies (Bursens 2002, 181) The hypothesis is that the ease with which European policy demands are implemented depends on the degree to which they ‘fit’ existing national policies and institutions (Duina 1997; Green Cowles et al., 2000; Knill and Lenschow 1998; Knill 2001) A ‘misfit’ results in adaptation costs for national administrations and hence protracted and incorrect implementation This argument is basically historical institutionalist in nature However, it has a clearly rationalist undertone, since most authors view the decision to implement as one consciously made by decision-makers seeking to avoid high adaptation costs In this view, both European integration and Europeanization are governed by the wish of policy makers to uphold the status quo (see figure 1)

Figure 1 Linking the shaping and taking: the goodness of fit

However intuitively appealing, the goodness of fit hypothesis has been rejected on several occasions, for various policy domains The first to do so were Knill and Lenschow (1998), who confronted the hypothesis with data

on the implementation of four environmental directives in the UK and in Germany The outcomes of their analysis are quite disappointing, since only

European Union

fit with member state’s status quo

European

member state

three of the eight cases are in line with the hypothesis For instance, two directives requiring major adaptations in the UK were implemented rather smoothly At the same time, one directive requiring hardly any changes in Germany was transposed with a huge delay Therefore, Knill & Lenschow (1998, 602) conclude that goodness of fit is in itself insufficient to explain implementation performance

A similar conclusion has been reached by various other scholars Héritier and Knill (2001, 288), to begin with, tested the goodness of fit hypothesis

on several cases in the field of transport policy They conclude that the goodness of fit is not even a necessary condition for adaptation to occur Haverland (2000), having analyzed the implementation of the packaging waste directive in several member states, argues that the goodness of fit is not decisive The UK, for instance, implemented the directive relatively fast and correctly, despite facing a high misfit where Germany, on the other hand, only faced moderate adaptation pressure, but implemented the directive two years late Finally, Treib (2003) has taken issue with the goodness of fit approach After studying the implementation of six social policy directives in Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, and the UK, he finds that the goodness of fit explains only 16 of the 24 cases

All in all, as appears from various empirical studies, the goodness of fit

is neither a sufficient, nor a necessary variable for explaining the implementation of EU policies in the member states The key problem is that

it is too static a concept, because it does not allow for a wish among policy makers to change the status quo In dealing with these disappointing results, broadly, two strategies can be followed

First, one can try to uphold the hypothesis by complementing it with additional or intervening variables despite the heavy empirical weather For instance, Knill and Lenschow (1998) suggest that the key to their unexpected outcomes is the degree to which national institutions are embedded The tendency in this literature is to view misfit as a necessary, if not a sufficient condition for domestic change (Green Cowles et al., 2000, Börzel and Risse

2003, 61, Börzel 2003a, 2) The outcomes of the implementation process are determined, besides the goodness of fit, by mediating variables such as the reform stage and dominant belief system (Héritier et al., 2001), political culture (Green Cowles et al., 2000; Börzel and Risse 2003), norm entrepreneurs (Börzel and Risse 2003), learning (Green Cowles et al., 2000), national reform capacity (Héritier 2002), multiple veto points (Green Cowles

et al., 2000), the degree of domestic support (Knill and Lenschow 1998), adaptation pressures (Knill 1998; Börzel 2003), the interests of chief executives (Duina and Blithe, 1999), and the differential empowerment of actors (Green Cowles et al., 2000)

The downside of this approach of adding variables is that the framework becomes less parsimonious Many of the revised theories are too open-ended When new variables are included, like the ones mentioned above, clear hypotheses can no longer be formulated ex ante The theory can only

be used as a heuristic device to interpret outcomes ex post

The second strategy does not suffer from this problem Rather than making the framework more-encompassing, it is proposed to make it more parsimonious Rather than considering the fit with existing national policies, the focus is on the preferences of the member states regarding the issue at hand This strategy allows for the possibility that member states want to change existing domestic policies by means of EU legislation Thus, by leaving the particular policy preferences of a member state unspecified, rather than making a particular assumption as to their substance, a more parsimonious model can be formulated.4

Figure 2 Linking the shaping and taking: member states’ preferences

This rationalist characterization of Europeanization is not new It ‘fits’ with (liberal) intergovernmentalist accounts of European integration (see Moravcsik 1993) as well as with rationalist accounts of EU implementation

In line with the findings of realist IR scholars, several students of European integration have claimed that implementation of EU policies is political

in nature (Snyder 1995, 57; Dimitrakopoulos and Richardson 2001b) Compliance with EU directives is regarded a matter of state choice, based

4 To some extent, we misrepresent the goodness of fit literature, in that it is not meant to be agency-oriented, but structuralist in nature (see for instance Treib 2003, 3) However, most of the goodness of fit literature departs wholly if not partly from an agency-related perspective (Héritier et al., 2001; Knill & Lenschow1998; Börzel, 2003a; Duina 1997; Börzel and Risse 2003; Knill 1998, Green Cowles et al., 2000)

upon political calculation (Puchala 1975; Gourevich 1996, 363) Having lost out at the decision-making stage, member states can try to limit their losses

by means of ‘opposition through the backdoor’ (Falkner et al., 2004, 3) This can be explained ‘if one assumes rational action by member states who wish

to reap the benefits of appearing to be good Europeans yet knowing all about the possibilities for policy erosion away from the high politic venues’ (Richardson 1996, 287)

The rationalist solution is also in line with the empirical findings of those who falsified the goodness of fit hypothesis in the first place and did not choose to salvage it Treib (2003) for instance claims that the key to the variation in implementation performance lies with the political preferences

of national governments Instead of oriented towards the status quo, govern- ments’ reactions are to a great extent determined by their party political preferences (ibid., 24) This means that a misfit may be inconsequential when a national government is willing to change existing policies The other side of the coin is that political opposition may occur even if the goodness of fit is high

A similar argument is made by Haverland, who claims that the key to his puzzling results is with the domestic political constellation The more institutional veto points, or stages in the policy process where the agreement

of domestic actors is needed, the more problematic implementation will be However, Haverland focuses not so much on the contents of government preferences, but on the institutional layout of the member state concerning veto points and preferences of political and societal actors such as Parliament and industry (Haverland 2000, 97)

The focus on domestic actors with possibly diverging preferences is also present in the approach by Dimitrova and Steunenberg (2000) who present a voting model of EU implementation Transposition is modeled as a decision-making process in which different groups of national actors need to co-operate; each actor can block the implementation process when the directive goes against its interests A host of actors is identified as veto players: political parties or fractions, parliamentary committees, interest groups and regional and local governments (Dimitrova and Steunenberg 2000, 215) All actors thus dispose of an informal veto power, which brings about a need for government to reach consensus on the implementation of the directive The strength of these veto player approaches is that they open up the black box of the state Rather than falling into the realist trap of portraying member states as unitary actors (see Hug 1999), they take a look at their constitutive parts, which allows for a dynamic account of EU implementation There are, however, two disadvantages to this approach First, it is unclear from the outset which actors can be classified as veto players - the theory runsthe risk of explanatory openness Which actor qualifies as a veto player only becomes clear afterwards (Ganghof 2003, 4)