The Routledge Handbook of European Public Policy

Nikolaos Zahariadis, Laurie Buonanno, Nikolaos Zahariadis, Laurie Buonanno

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317404026
• Subtopic: Economic Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Routledge Handbook of European Public Policy provides an in-depth and systematic understanding of EU policies. It covers theoretical approaches on the policy process and the various stages of public policy formulation and decision making, and discusses key questions of contemporary European governance. The handbook introduces major concepts, trends, and methodologies in a variety of comparative settings thereby providing the first systematic effort to include theoretical and substantive analyses of European public policies in a single volume.

The handbook is divided into four sections:

• Concepts and approaches in EU policymaking;
• Substantive policies of the EU, including economic and social, fiscal and monetary, areas of freedom, security, and justice, and external policies;
• Elements of the policy cycle;
• Themes ranging from crisis and resistance to controversies in education.

This handbook will be an essential reference for students and scholars of the European Union, public policy, social policy, and more broadly for European and comparative politics.

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1

EUROPEAN UNION POLICYMAKING

Issues and debates

Laurie Buonanno and Nikolaos Zahariadis

Introduction

The subject of “policymaking” is characterized by the content of policies (competition, foreign and security, banking, educational, and so on), the processes which a governing body employs in the act of making policies, and the various phases of the “policy cycle” which comprise the birth, life, evolution, death (and, sometimes resurrection) of public policies. These three aspects of policymaking are conditioned by several factors, some which all postindustrial democracies share; others are specific to the European Union (EU). In this handbook, “EU” and “European” are used interchangeably to signify policy that is taken at the European level. In a similar vein, “Europeanization” refers to the infusion of the EU acquis communautaire into the national politics and policies of member states.

This chapter is divided into three sections: issues, debates, and a guide to using this handbook. The first section considers the following subjects: the EU as a unique construction, a summary of the policies with which the EU is concerned, policymaking processes, and the policymaking cycle. The second section addresses what may be the principal debate of the EU at the time of this writing—the EU’s (many) crises and “how far is far enough?” to resolve those policy lapses and failures which have undermined faith in the efficacy of the European integration project for its member states and the European polity. This section includes an exploration of the five scenarios offered in the European Commission’s (2017) post-Brexit White Paper on the Future of Europe of EU 27. The third section of this chapter serves as a roadmap to the reader for the only handbook that has been published to date on the subject of European public policy.

Issues

The EU as a unique construction

EU scholars have long referred to the EU as sui generis, a unique construction and therefore not comparable to other governing systems. Politicians, too, have alluded to this uniqueness—even José Barroso, then European Commission president, once referred to the EU as an “unidentified political object” (José Barroso on EUXTV-The Europe Channel, 2007). There is, however, a considerable number of scholars who do not think the EU is so different from national states as to rule out the tools employed to study the politics, society, and economies of the latter. This research perspective has gained more adherents over the past 25 years since the publication of a provocative article by Simon Hix (1994), in which he argued to understand the nature of EU integration, the EU mainly functioned as an “internal political arena,” which could be understood using approaches applied to the field of comparative politics. In publishing this article, Hix challenged the prevailing approaches which had heretofore applied paradigms drawn from international relations (mainly international law and organizations in the form of neofunctionalism and intergovernmentalism) to explain European integration. This new perspective produced studies which explored the EU in terms of federalism (see Sbragia, 1992, who anticipates Hix on the applicability of the comparativists’ toolkit in EU studies), fusion versus separation of powers (see, for example, Fabbrini, 2008), public opinion (Gabel, 1998), interest group behavior (Greenwood, 2011, is a scholar who has contributed to our understanding of this issue), institutional behavior (Nugent, 2017b), and democratization (Schweiger, 2017; Weiler, 2014). This new way of thinking about the EU opened the door for the study of European policymaking—not only with an increasing tendency for scholars to specialize in particular EU policies, but also to study policymaking processes and the various aspects of the policy cycle.

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The policies

From the founding of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC, 1953) to the Single Market Act of 1986, the European Community (as it was then called) had become increasingly involved with a large number of policies traditionally associated with sovereign states. Many of these policies arose inevitably from the aspirations of the Treaty of Rome, which in 1957 produced the European Economic Community (EEC). This aspiration can be boiled down to the oft-repeated, but the sine qua non of the EU—the Four Freedoms—which promised that someday in the future Europe would be characterized by freedom of movement of persons, goods, services, and capital—a true common market akin to that of any federal state. As barriers to the internal market fell, the member states needed to increasingly agree to European-wide policies necessitated by integration—from food safety standards to environmental protections. Slowly, but viewed over the course of 60 years breathtakingly fast, policies that had been exclusively the province of the member states became shared policies. The Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) and the Treaty of the European Union (TEU), which both entered into force in 2009 (the result of the Lisbon Treaty negotiations), are the most recent reforming treaties (the EU amends/reforms existing treaties). While the TEU covers the principles upon which the EU is founded and its institutional structures, the TFEU covers policies. Part One, Title I of the TFEU divides the EU’s policy competences into three categories—exclusive, shared, and supporting. (See Box 1.1.)

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Box 1.1 Categories and areas of European Union competence (TFEU Part One, Title I)

Exclusive competence

When the Treaties confer on the Union exclusive competence in a specific area, only the Union may legislate and adopt legally binding acts, the Member States being able to do so themselves only if so empowered by the Union or for the implementation of Union acts. TFEU Part One, Title I, Article 2 (1).

Shared competence

When the Treaties confer on the Union a competence shared with the Member States in a specific area, the Union and the Member States may legislate and adopt legally binding acts in that area. The Member States shall exercise their competence to the extent that the Union has not exercised its competence. The Member States shall again exercise their competence to the extent that the Union has decided to cease exercising its competence. TFEU Part One, Title I, Article 2 (2).

Supporting competence

In certain areas and under the conditions laid down in the Treaties, the Union shall have competence to carry out actions to support, coordinate or supplement the actions of the Member States, without thereby superseding their competence in these areas. TFEU Part One, Title I, Article 2 (5).

Part Three of the TFEU lays out the respective policy responsibilities or “competences” of the EU and its member states. (See Box 1.2.)

Box 1.2 The EU’s policy power as laid out by the TFEU^*

Exclusive competence

Custom union

Competition rules

Monetary policy for eurozone members

Conservation of marine biological resources under the common fisheries policy

Common Commercial Policy

Conclusion of international agreements pertaining to the EU’s internal competences

Shared competence

Internal market

Social policy

Economic, social, and territorial cohesion

Agriculture and fisheries

Environment

Consumer protection

Transport

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Trans-European networks

Energy

Area of freedom, security, and justice

Common safety concerns in public health matters

Research and development

Space policy

Development cooperation and humanitarian aid

Supporting competence

Protection and improvement of human health

Industry

Culture

Tourism

Education, vocational training, youth, and sport

Civil protection

Administrative cooperation

^*TFEU, Part One, Title I

The reach of EU policies are constrained by the related concepts of subsidiarity and proportionality. The legal basis for these concepts can be found in both the TFEU (defined) and the TEU (application). The principle of subsidiarity applies to those areas of shared competence between the EU and its member states, when the objectives of the proposed action cannot be sufficiently achieved by the member states, and the action can, by reason of its scale or effects, be implemented more successfully by the EU (Raffaelli, 2017). In effect, any policy that is not already the exclusive competence of the EU should be enacted at the member state level, if possible. Although the term “subsidiarity” is of European use and origin, the concept it describes is a fundamental characteristic of federal systems, especially that brand of federalism where the local and regional authorities are historically accustomed to a great deal of autonomy—which is certainly the case of the EU’s member states. In sum, the EU should stay out of policymaking where it does not belong or is not invited by the member states (or given rights to by the treaties).

Article 5 of the TEU defines proportionality as “the content and form of Union action shall not exceed what is necessary to achieve the objectives of the Treaties.” Therefore, the principle of proportionality acts as a check on the bugaboos of modern governance—overregulation or a disproportionate response to a perceived problem. In sum, proportionality and subsidiarity are key principles taken into account by the EU’s legislative bodies (the European Parliament and the European Council) when considering the European Commission’s legislative proposals.

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As legal documents, the EU Treaties are quite good at summarizing the “state of play,” but not as accurate in the reality of policymaking practice. More often than not, throughout the EU’s history, policymaking has outrun the Treaties—which have undergone five successful major amendments since the Treaty of Rome (the SEA, Maastricht, Amsterdam, Nice, and Lisbon). The Treaties have often codified what the EU has already been doing. There are exceptions, of course, notably transport policy—mentioned in the Treaty of Rome as a policy for which the EU would be much involved, but has stayed firmly in the hands of the member states. But on balance, many EU policies evolved outside of the treaties—examples include the environment, foreign and security policy, police and judicial cooperation, border control (Schengen), and return of asylum seekers (Dublin). A key feature, therefore, of European policies is of a continuing expanding portfolio (Buonanno & Nugent, 2013, pp. 5, 7).

Table 1.1 also reveals that the EU tends to be more involved in not only those policies that are directly related to the market, but also policies that reach beyond the border, or more precisely, involve market failure such as consumer protection and the environment. So, too, given the freedom of movement of persons, civil liberties, cross-border crime, working conditions, internal border control, and since the 2015–2016 migration crisis, external border control, have become shared competences. Another aspect affecting the nature of the EU’s policy portfolio is the EU’s meager budget, which accounts for only one percent of EU Gross National Income (see Chapter 14 of this volume), ensuring the EU has very limited or virtually no involvement in those policy areas involving high public expenditures (examples include social welfare, health, jobs training, and housing). As explained in Chapter 3 of this volume, the EU is often described as a “regulatory state” (Majone, 1994, 1996) or sometimes “regulatory federalism” (Kelemen, 2004, p. 160) precisely because its main task is to correct market failure rather than to support or advance the European Social Model. This choice to emphasize the single market (negative integration) and correct for market failure, has been increasingly seen as being carried out at the expense of “Social Europe.”

The EU has often been compared to the US on the basis of several factors—its popu...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The Routledge Handbook of European Public Policy
• Praise
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Boxes
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• 1 European Union Policymaking: Issues and Debates
• Section 1 Concepts and Approaches – Overview
• Section 2 Substantive Policies – Overview
• Section 3 the Policy Cycle – Overview
• Section 4 Themes
• Index