Europeanization and Domestic Policy Change

The Case of Italy

Paolo Graziano

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415574914
• eBook ISBN: 9781135124908
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines the impact of Europeanization on the domestic politics of EU member states, focussing on agricultural policy, cohesion policy and employment policy with a detailed comparative case study on Italy.

Though a founding member, Italy has often had an uneasy relationship with the EU and found it difficult to be influential in EU politics and to comply effectively with EU policies and institutional pressures. The main focus of this book is the analysis of Italy-EU relationship from a policy-based perspective, adopting the conceptual lenses developed by Europeanization research. By looking at the evolution of agricultural, regional cohesion and employment policy the book shows how the politics of adaptation have brought Italy closer to Europe in the past twenty years and further highlights the impact of the EU-Italy relationship on domestic institutions and politics. The author explains that even though Italy has increasingly learned to respect EU membership requirements, its influence over agenda setting within the EU remains limited.

Europeanization and Domestic Policy Change will be of interest to students and scholars of European Politics, Europeanization, comparative politics and Italian politics.

1
Europeanization and domestic policy change

A framework for analysis

1.1 The emergence and consolidation of European studies

Over the past 15 years Europeanization has been an increasingly investigated political phenomenon. As we will further discuss in the following sections, Europeanization entered the scene after a long period of neofunctionalist versus intergovernmentalist struggle, which by the end of the 1990s seemed to have lost part of its analytical appeal (Risse-Kappen 1996). In fact, prior to Europeanization debates, the European political organization (today’s European Union) had attracted rising interest among political science scholars. Surely, since the late 1950s European studies as a somewhat specialized discipline has become increasingly relevant in both international relations and in comparative politics (Jupille and Caporaso 1999). For almost 40 years, the main theoretical and empirical debates concerned the formation and consolidation of the new European polity, and the main focus regarded the ways through which the European political organization was set up. The ‘ontological phase’ of the scholarly analysis (ibid.) regarded primarily the nature of the beast (Risse-Kappen 1996): what kind of supranational political organization was the emerging European organization?¹ In Jupille and Caporaso’s reading, the approaches used by US scholars of the EU have been substantially different from the analytical lenses developed by European scholars:

American students of the EU have predominantly used the toolkit of IR. They have focused on the ways in which sovereign states have come together and (…) created a set of rules permitting them collectively to achieve outcomes unavailable to them individually. (…) Europeans, by contrast, have tended to use analytical tools drawn from policy analysis or public administration, more reminiscent of comparative politics.

(1999: 430)

More specifically, since the late 1950s a predominantly IR debate resided at the heart of political science understanding of the functioning of the EU.² On the one hand, the ‘neofunctionalist’ reading of Europe provided initially by Haas (1958) focused on the societal driving forces of European political integration. Haas defined political integration as a ‘process whereby political actors in several distinct national settings are persuaded to shift their loyalties, expectations and political activities toward a new centre, whose institutions possess or demand jurisdiction over the pre-existing national states’ (ibid.: 16). In the original analysis provided by Haas, European integration was fuelled by the ‘loyalty shift’ expressed by non-state elites – such as the new ‘regional’ or supranational bureaucracy and interest associations formed at the level of the ‘new’ region – who considered a new (European) supra-national setting to be in line with their predefined social and economic preferences. The key motors of European integration, in this view, were non-state actors seeking a new centre that could be beneficial to their selected interests and their ultimate goal would be to ‘regionalize’ interests: ‘As the process of integration proceeds, it is assumed that values will undergo change, that interests will be redefined in terms of regional rather than purely national orientations’ (ibid.: 13). In the words of a ‘proud’ neo-functionalist:

[R]egional integration is an intrinsically sporadic and conflictual process, but one in which, under conditions of democracy and pluralistic representation, national governments will find themselves increasingly entangled in regional pressures and end up resolving their conflicts by conceding a wider scope and devolving more authority to the regional organizations they have created.

(Schmitter 2004: 47)

Put another way, in the neo-functionalist reading, European integration followed an ‘expansive logic of sector integration’ in the form of inevitable ‘spillovers’ from one economic sector to another (functional spillover), which eventually also leads to (European) political integration (political spillover).

On the other hand, the ‘intergovernmentalists’ – such as Stanley Hoffmann (1966, 1982) – or the ‘liberal’ pioneers of intergovernmentalism (Moravcsik, 1993, 1998) challenged both the empirical and theoretical strengths of neofunctionalism since, for the former, it increasingly appeared that neofunctionalism ‘mispredicted both the trajectory and the process of EC evolution’ (Moravcsik 1993: 476) and, for the latter, neofunctionalism ‘lacked a theoretical core clearly enough specified to provide a sound basis for precise empirical testing and improvement’ (ibid.). In fact, the main claim of intergovernmentalists was that, after years of European integration, the state was still ‘alive and kicking’ and capable of shaping further the process of supranational integration. As Hoffmann notes in his 1982 contribution: ‘the most striking reality is not the frequent and well-noted impotence of the so-called sovereign state. It is its survival’ (21).

More specifically, according to the intergovernmentalist reading of the process of regional integration, the main motors of European integration traditionally were not non-state actors that ‘by-passed’ the state but rather national governments, which remained at the heart of a new international regime. ‘The best way of analysing the EEC is not in the traditional terms of integration theory, which assumes that the members are engaged in the formation of a new, supranational political entity superseding the old nations (…) and that there is a zero-sum game between the nation-states on the one hand, the EEC on the other (…). It is to look at the EEC as an international regime’ (ibid.: 33). Therefore, intergovernmentalism clearly focused on the enduring presence of governments that domestically formed their preferences and subsequently negotiated at the regional (e.g. European) level, searching to obtain the preferred political outcomes.

We will not dwell further on a discussion of the two main contrasting theoretical approaches to European integration, but we sustain that such a background is relevant for a better understanding of the ‘Europeanization turn’ in EU studies, which was connected to the loss of attractiveness of other approaches, mainstream for decades. In fact, until the end of the 1990s – with few exceptions (Bulmer 1983; Ladrech 1994) – the main focus of European studies scholars remained the description and explanation of the European integration process, whereas very limited space was left for a systematic analysis of the ongoing relationship between European and domestic political institutions and policies. And this is where Europeanization comes in as a new phase in European integration studies or a ‘third step’ in a European-based regional integration theory because, ‘with progress in European integration (…) it became clear that traditional theories of integration were not adequate to describe, let alone explain, developments at the European level’ (Caporaso 2007: 25).

1.2 The Europeanization turn in European studies

From a historical perspective, the Europeanization turn was clearly connected to the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty, which – as is well known – provided new impetus to European integration by widening the scope of the European political organization. To be sure, prior to the 1992 Treaty within the scholarly debate, Bulmer was one of the first researchers to try to go beyond the ‘supranationalim versus intergovernmentalism’ debate. In his path-breaking 1983 contribution, Bulmer called for a ‘domestic politics’ approach to EU studies by advocating the use of more conventional analytical tools in order to better understand European integration since ‘the supranationalism-versus-intergovernmentalist debate overshadowed some of the equally important findings concerning policy-making in the member states’ (1983: 349).

In 1993, Anderssen and Eliassen devoted an edited volume to the analysis of ‘Making Policy in Europe: The Europeification of National Policy-making’, wherein ‘Europeification’ was considered to be an effect of the emergence of the European Union, defined as ‘a system of transnational authority and policy-making’ (ibid.: 255–256).

Notwithstanding Anderssen and Eliassen’s important contribution, until the end of the 1990s the Europeanization turn in European studies was poorly visible. This was probably due to the often evocative use of the term prior to the analytical work provided by Radaelli (2000, 2003a). In fact, as Radaelli noted in his pioneering contributions on Europeanization, in order to be a particularly fruitful concept its conceptual limitation has to be clearly established. In several accounts, Europeanization had been used as a synonym for convergence and/or European integration or as synonymous with mere effects determined by the European Union (Anderssen and Eliassen 1993). But this was particularly unsatisfactory if the concept was to ‘travel’ (Sartori 1970) and innovate with respect to the existing literature and not to simply introduce greater analytical confusion. Definitions are not the only concern for the development of new research challenges, as Olsen noted:

[w]hile conceptual clarity is of great importance also in the European context (…), the research challenge is not primarily one of inventing definitions (…). The challenge is to model the dynamics of change in ways that make the simplifying assumptions behind various definitions accessible to empirical tests.

(2002: 944)

Nevertheless, as we will further argue in the following section, clearly defining the object of study is the first step that has to be taken in order to then proceed rigorously towards empirical testing. As Caporaso rightly states:

The research challenge involves both inventing definitions and model building. Indeed, the two are related. Among the criteria for assessing definitions, there is the standard that says we ought to use words in such a way as to strengthen the connections between our terms and other interesting phenomena.

(2007: 24)

But prior to ‘diving’ into the analysis of the various facets of Europeanization, we need to (a) investigate further the link between Europeanization and the above-mentioned research strands of European studies, and (b) discuss the various empirical implications of the Europeanization turn in European studies.

At least implicitly, Europeanization research builds on the classic integration perspectives briefly discussed in the previous section. First, with respect to neofunctionalism, and its more recent variants – supranational governance (Sandholtz and Stone Sweet 1998) and multi-level governance (Hooghe and Marks 2001; Piattoni 2009) – the Europeanization literature is inspired by the notion of ‘uploading’ domestic societal preferences at the EU level and their interplay with domestic governments and European institutions. Second, with respect to the intergovernmentalist approach, Europeanization is inspired by the focus on the domestic state-related sources of European decision making and their consequences on the nature of EU institutions and policies. Nevertheless, the Europeanization approach clearly goes beyond this European-centred orientation of ‘classic’ integration theories by focusing primarily on a different target: the domestic level. To be sure, since the mid-1990s the domestic ‘shift’ was inbuilt in the public administration and public policy-orientated analysis of domestic patterns of adaptation to EU membership (Rometsch and Wessels 1996; Mény et al. 1996; Hank and Soetendorp 1998; Boerzel 1999; Kassim Menon et al. 2000, 2001; Heritier et al. 2001; Zeff and Pirro 2001). As already noted by Caporaso (2007), this reorientation was clearly connected to the expansion of EU powers that followed the adoption (and ratification) of the Maastricht Treaty, which reinvigorated the EU political arena as a provider of new political opportunities for both domestic governments and societal actors involved in national decision making.

The above-mentioned contributions, together with the first more explicit Europeanization studies (Olsen 1996; Harmsen 1999), were characterized by a clear change of focus since they were primarily centred on domestic administrative and policy adaptation, whereas other scholars have considered also the changes in the ‘organizational logic of national politics and policy-making’ induced by EU membership (Ladrech 1994: 69) or more broad changes connected to European integration that had occurred within ‘national political systems’ (Goetz and Hix 2000). In the early stages of the development of Europeanization research, the main analytical core of the studies was domestic implementation of EU policies that also shared several substantive – but not methodological – features with the ‘EU directive transposition’ research agenda (Boerzel 2001; Mastenbroek 2005; Kaeding 2006). The implementation studies originated from the idea that European integration remained an incomplete political project as long as European rules were not implemented according to their intentions (Sverdrup 2007). In fact, the first main empirical focus of Europeanization research was in the most developed European policy domains such as environmental policy (Knill and Lenschow 1998), transport policy (Héritier et al. 2001) and cohesion policy (Conzelmann 1998; Benz and Eberlein 1999). Among the ‘classic’ European policies, only agricultural policy has been relatively absent from early Europeanization research, arguably because it was the policy domain that had par excellence completely turned ‘European’ as a result of the integrated character of the Common Agricultural Policy. Yet, as Roederer-Rynning (2007) convincingly argued, even in the field of agricultural policy the domestic impact of European policies – for example, with regard to state–farmer relations – is far from self-evident. In the early 2000s, other policy domains in which the involvement of the EU was less important were also investigated, such as social policy (Graziano 2003), refugee policy (Lavenex 2001) or even citizenship policy (Checkel 2001; Vink 2001). These studies contain mainly qualitative case studies or focused policy-based comparisons of a limited number of countries, whereas another set of contributions were more country-based analyses that went beyond a mere sectoral analysis (Falkner 2001; Grabbe 2001).

Furthermore, Europeanization research has also provided more focused ‘European’ analytical lenses for the study of domestic politics and policy-making. Both political scientists and political sociologists have increasingly realized that the EU, as an advanced instance of regional integration, has become a significant part of national politics. Especially with regards to policy-making, it is currently very rare to find domestic policies that are not somehow connected to European ones. Without considering the European sources of domestic policies, today any domestic-centred policy analysis would neglect important international constraints and opportunities for political actors. This observation holds true beyond policy analysis and applies to changing domestic opportunity structures and political environments more generally. First, the study of the domestic executives could not be carried out without a clear understanding of how the governments developed and coordinated domestic preferences in EU negotiations and increasingly tried to oversee domestic implementation of EU policies (Zeff and Pirro 2001). Second, other aspects of national politics have also been increasingly investigated adopting – more or less explicitly – Europeanization analytical lenses: domestic Parliaments (Holzhacker 2002), political parties (Ladrech 2002), party systems (Mair 2007), interest groups (Grote and Lang 2003) and sub-national governments (Pasquier 2005). Without incorporating a Europeanization analytical angle, several aspects of the recent transformation of the above-mentioned features of domestic politics would not have been fully understood.

Taking a closer look at the development of the Europeanization literature, important publications peaked at the end of the 1990s and early 2000s (see Featherstone (2003: 5) for a bibliometric analysis of the period 1981–2001; see also Exadaktylos and Radaelli (2009) for a similar exercise, although more focused on research design in Europeanization studies). Why did the Europeanization turn in European integration studies emerge during the second half of the 1990s? Mainly because of two fundamental reasons: the first is endogenous to EU studies, and the second is exogenous. The first motivation is connected to the loss of analytical appeal of the almost four decade-long debate between ‘neofunctionalists’ and ‘intergovernmentalists’ and the intellectual saturation of a long-lasting scholarly debate. A ‘new analytical space’ (Caporaso 2007) in EU studies could be opened in order to provide new tools for the understanding of the overall functioning of the EU multi-level governance setting. As the authors of the path-breaking contribution on Europeanization (Transforming Europe: Europeanization and Domestic Change) point out in the introduction to their book, their publication was the result of a ‘joint research project [that wanted to] examine the ‘next phase’ of European integration studies: the impact of the European Union on the members states’ (Cowles et al. 2001: ix). In other words, by the end of the 1990s it clearly emerged – at least to some inspired scholars – that European integration studies needed to enter into a new phase that would predominantly focus on different topics with respect to the more consolidated European integration literature. The somewhat sterile contraposition between the two leading interpretations of the EU needed to be overcome by shifting the object of investigation from the construction of a new supranational level of government to its impact. The second reason is connected to the emerging relevance of EU policies and institutions after the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty: as in the case of national Pa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• 1 Europeanization and domestic policy change: a framework for analysis
• 2 Italian politics and EU decision making
• 3 Europeanization and Italian agricultural policy
• 4 Europeanization and Italian regional cohesion policy
• 5 Europeanization and Italian employment policy
• 6 Europeanization and the politics of domestic adaptation
• 7 Conclusion
• Appendices
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index