The Developing Place of Portugal in the European Union

Jose Magone

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351483780
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

"After decades of isolation and a turbulent transition to democracy, Portugal's integration into the European Union has given political, economic, social, and cultural stability to a country that had to overcome the trauma of losing an empire. This volume clearly is a major contribution to the study of how Portugal became part of the European Union as a political system and its development towards Europeanization and domestication.Magone first lays a theoretical framework for the study of Europeanization and discusses political parties, the political system, and Portuguese society in terms of Europeanization. He then examines public administration, how the European Union and the OECD impacted on the modernization agenda, and includes a discussion of the national EU policy coordination. Magone also considers the Portuguese Euro-elite and how they interacted with the Portuguese presidency and the processes of decision-making going on among the different levels of the governance system of the European Union. He highlights a case study of the Portuguese presidency of the European Union, which took place in the first half of 2003. In addition, Magone discusses the impact of the EU structural funds on Portugal, and scrutinizes Portuguese foreign and defense policies, in particular its reconstructed foreign policy, which was clearly instrumental in achieving the independence of East Timor. He reviews the growing integration of Portugal into the emerging structures of the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), concluding with the challenges that Portugal will face in the future in the education, health, and business sectors.An interesting finding is the growing alienation of the population from the political class, who clearly make all the decisions in relation to the European Union without proper consultation of the population through referenda. In sum, this book is vital to understand one of the oldest nation-states of the world.JosÚ M. Magone is senior lecturer"

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The European Union and National Political Systems: Towards Systemic Integration

Understanding the European Union as a Political System

One of the major characteristics of the European integration process is that it remained almost unnoticed for the past fifty years. Indeed, the first real awareness of the populations of the member-states was before and after the Treaty of Maastricht, which set up the criteria and the schedule for the establishment of a Economic and Monetary Union by the beginning of the millennium. This smooth evolutionary process towards a new European Union multilevel governance system was constructed mostly by political and administrative elites. The populations of the European Union were only asked to give legitimacy after the introduction of the direct elections to the European Parliament, so that the “Eurosclerosis” of stagnating institution-building could be overcome. Indeed, since the mid-1980s, the European Union has been affected by a new wave of institution-building, but this time linked to the transition towards a new wave of globalization. In the past thirty years, the European Union has become the main actor of this transition, particularly since the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989. This coincidence of so many events in such a short period of time seems to suggest that this was a breaking point between the modern industrial society and the emergent knowledge society.

The introduction of the Euro in January 2002 in twelve democracies can be regarded as an important achievement, in spite of the doomsday prognosis of euroskepticism and more cautious academics. It represents the development towards a new era in the relations between the European Union and other major economies in the world. One should not lose sight of the real aim of the European Union, which is to strengthen the European economy in relation to the United States and Japan. One should be aware that there is still much to be done to achieve this aim. In addition, the Euro constitutes the first major symbol of a systemic integration between the supranational level and the national political systems. The so-called European System of Central Banks, headed by the European Central Bank, created a functioning integration of monetary systems. The importance of this fact cannot be underestimated. It constitutes the establishment of a supranational policy community, which will have cultural effects towards a shift of paradigm from national sovereignty to shared pooled sovereignty.¹

It is important to contextualize the topic of this book—the impact of the European Union on the Portuguese political system—before we turn to the more concrete empirical study of the processes that affect small member-states in general, and Portugal in particular. It is central to study the inflated concept of Europeanization within the European Union Multilevel Governance System. It is important to give it more scientific rigor, so that the Europeanizing processes can be quantified and qualified. One thought that one must consider is that all member-states are now affected by different processes that are identified under the same label of Europeanization. We will make an effort to differentiate analytically between various forms of Europeanization, which will give us the ideal conditions to study empirically the effects on the Portuguese case. There is a tendency to look at national political systems as independent from the overall European Union system. I do not follow this route; I define the Portuguese political system as being engaged in a systemic interactive integrative process with the supranational level of the European Union. Each one has a distinct process of interactive integration, but they all constitute a political system that is still in the making. The dynamics of interaction is slowly reifying an inbetween level of cultural transnational integration, what Weiler calls infranationalism.² One major unnoticed aspect creating these transnational policy communities is naturally European law, which has a fifty-year history, has its translation into all languages of the European Union, and is now taken for granted as internalized “national” legislation.³

In sum, to understand the Portuguese political system, one needs to contextualize it in the new European Union multilevel governance system. This will lead us then to the conceptualization of Europeanization.

The European Union Multilevel Governance System

Any attempt to depict the European Union is always characterized by difficulty, because it is so complex. Most attempts are simplifications, maps of the actual reality of the European integration process. Maps help us to find places at home or abroad, but they never comprise all the information. This is the case of the multilevel governance (MLG) paradigm, which can be regarded as a major one to understand processes between different levels. Meanwhile it is finding its usefulness in discussing global governance. In this volume, we are keen to stick to the heuristic device created by Gary Marks and Liesbet Hooghe throughout the 1990s. The literature on MLG has meanwhile become quite voluminous. Most of the research has been directed towards the relationship between subnational actors, such as the regions and the local authorities, and the national and supranational level. Another field in which the MLG approach has been used is in the means interest groups use to try to influence policy. Although the MLG approach is quite holistic in its nature, it is excellent for mapping the position of a country within a process of European integration. Combined with the concept of Europeanization we come to an approach that is able to take into account micro-, meso-, macro-, and meta-levels of analysis without having to leave the overall map.

Figure 1.1 European Union Political System

Governance comprises the political institutions, civil society actors and the sum of all processes between these entities. It can be studied in different fields from the political/public field to the economic/cultural field. Moreover, it also can be applied to the policy process. All of these constitute different categories of the map, such as with geography where one can have political, physical, natural resources or other kinds of topic-specific maps. What makes Marks’ and Hooghe’s approach more appealing is that the map consists of different levels, meaning that one can study governance within and between the supranational, transnational, national, and regional level. This naturally shows that Marks and Hooghe are writing implicitly about an integrated political system already in the making.⁴ Clearly, they follow many of the thoughts of another theorist of MLG, Philippe Schmitter.⁵ He identifies the European Union as an imperfect polity. What makes the big difference between Marks/Hooghe and Schmitter is that the latter never makes the connection between the levels; on the contrary he focuses mainly on the supranational level and this is certainly an incomplete perception of what the European Union has become since the mid-1980s in real terms.

Figure 1.2 The European Union Muiltilevel Governance and Different Forms of Europeanization

In this respect, on the one hand, one has to be cautious about the European Union literature, which tended to focus until now on the supranational level, and venture only sometimes to the transnational level. On the other hand, the Europeanization literature, with some exceptions, has been dominated by highly speculative studies about the impact of the supranational level on national politics and public policy. This naturally leads one to conceptualize a separation of the levels of analysis from each other and a conceptualization of them being independent from each other. In reality, however, as we argue in this volume by studying the Portuguese case they are interconnected and interdependent with each other in an interactive integrated political system. This, however, is still a heuristic assumption in many ways, because the European Union MLG map developed by Marks and Hooghe is still in the making. Sometimes, the only thing we need to do is to gather the scattered research of the different levels and reconstruct it within the MLG paradigm; sometimes there is a strong need to start from scratch and do new research related to that. When studying a country such as Portugal from a MLG perspective we are bound to use comparative data to show the specific similarities and differences in the adjustment of the Portuguese political system within the wider multilevel governance system.

As mentioned before, each country is integrated within the MLG system in a different way. Some, particularly large countries, are major players and designers of the future of the European Union, while others, mostly smaller countries, tend to accept the positions taken by the larger countries. In each category, there are countries that may be so-called leaders in certain aspects and others laggards. This indicates the complexity, asymmetry, and diversity of the European Union multilevel governance system.

In this volume, we attempt to analyze the Portuguese case using the MLG system. This means that we will be looking at the Portuguese case from various perspectives and on different levels in order to show a more complex picture of the Europeanization of the Portuguese political system.

The systemic levels of the multilevel governance system are defined in Table 1.1.

Our main task will be to look at processes from the Portuguese national level of governance and relate it to the other governance levels (supranational, transnational, and local levels). Before that, however, we must go one step further and elucidate the various definitions of Europeanization.

The Concept of Europeanization

The concept of Europeanization became widespread in the 1990s. It characterizes the impact of the supranational level on the politics and policy of the member-states. This original meaning was extended later to other processes. One of the first to present a viable definition of Europeanization was Robert Ladrech in a much quoted article:

Europeanization is an incremental process reorienting the direction and shape of politics to the degree that EC political and economic dynamics become part of the organizational logic of national politics and policy-making.⁶

Table 1.1 The European Union Multilevel Governance System

...

LEVELS OF GOVERNANCE IN THE EUROPEAN UNION	DESCRIPTION
Supranational Level	Comprises the core institutions of the European Union (Council, Commission, European Parliament) the so-called European civil Society (Eurogroups) and the interaction between them.
Transnational Level	Is the main field of interactions among supranational, national, and subnational levels. It creates transnational communities in different fields. It includes most of the comitology of the Commission; working groups and Coreper I and II of the Council, the Economic and Social Committee and the regular meetings with other similar committees, the committee of regions, policy communities such as the Eurogroup, European administrative space, Euroregions.
National Level	Comprises the political institutions, civil society, and citizens. It is more than the sum of all the processes among these actors.
Subnational Level	Comprises the regional/local institutions and regional/local civil societies as well as the regional populations. It is more than the sum of all the processes among these actors.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acronyms
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The European Union and National Political Systems: Towards Systemic Integration
• 2 The Europeanization of the Core Political System
• 3 The Continuing Nationalization of the Portuguese Party System
• 4 Social Change and Political Culture: The Impact of the European Union
• 5 The Difficult Reform of Public Administration: The Importance and Challenge of Internationalization and Europeanization
• 6 National European Union Policy Coordination in Portugal: The Establishment of a Simple System
• 7 The Portuguese Euro-Elite and the Presidency of the European Union 2000. A Study of the Network of Interactions within the European Union Multilevel Governance System
• 8 Catching Up with the European Union: The Strategic Role of the Structural Funds
• 9 The Return of Portuguese Foreign Policy: Bridging the European Union and the Lusophone World
• 10 Conclusions: Challenges to Portuguese Democracy within the European Union
• Selected Bibliography
• Index