Policy making in the european union pdf

Her book explores the impact of the day to day work of policy maker, interest groups and bureaucrats in influencing the environment in which European Treaty formulation and ratification are taken. She sheds new light on the wide range of policy areas in which institutions such as the Commission of the European Union and the European Court of Justice have succeded in expanding the scope of EU competence despite national government opposition.

Get BOOK. Policy-Making in the European Union. She sheds new light. They remind us of how an overarching concern with insecurity, urgency and crisis can become the norm rather than an exception to normal ways of working Huysmans, ; Neal, The analysis here thus marries the traditional EU literature on policy-making dy- namics with critical security studies to shed extra analytical light on these developments.

The article proceeds in three steps. It then explores implications for three topics of interest to European integration scholars. It is argued that traditional agenda-setting processes now share space with both pre-emptive and reactive forms of agenda-setting, thanks to the increased focused on potential and actual crises.

The second is collective decision-making per se. The third implication is the legitimacy upon which European integration rests. Policy-making is a full range of decision activities: from agenda-setting to policy initiation and from decision-making to implementation Peters, Using semi-structured interviews, text analysis and database trawling, a host of data was collected on the preven- tion, preparation, response and recovery from events deemed a danger to the European population at home or abroad.

These sys- tems cast an anticipatory eye on events or situations likely to justify a European response. In addition, there appeared a high number of early warning and rapid alert systems in place to communicate actual crises unfolding. And they have grown of late: research shows a steep rise in both horizon scanning and early warning systems, which together grew from less than 10 in to more than 70 in Backman and Rhinard, Some horizon scanning systems include only an early warning function, while other systems also provide a rapid response role.

Some observers may argue that these networks are simply banal communication systems. Yet research shows that the rapid re- sponse function includes not only the communication of actions taken or to be taken but also the coordination of decisions. During the evacuation of Libya the consular online cooperation network was used by national governments to no- tify one another of extraction sorties. That led Member States to ask for air assistance from other Member States via the network Boin et al.

Additional data can be found in Backman and Rhinard, and Boin et al. Altogether 42 interviews were conducted in four stages, during , , and Much of the data can be viewed online at www. No fashionable directorate-general in the Com- mission is without its own purpose-built, highly secure centre for information exchange, data analysis and crisis coordination.

They are tasked with consolidating pertinent information, drawing up di- gestible reports for policy-makers and coordinating with their counterparts in national capitals, Brussels and, in some cases, other international organizations. They range from rooms that are barely used the Strategic Analysis and Response Centre to centres that have three rooms for handling simultaneous crises, and which are staffed 24 hours a day the European Response Coordination Centre.

Perhaps the most intriguing trend is the adoption of special procedures for crisis situations — and the practice of these procedures in EU-wide exercises. Most directorates-general especially those with crisis experience have procedures for abbreviated decision-making. Procedures vary, but they generally stipulate the steps to be taken in the event of an un- expected, urgent event that requires the DG to respond quickly.

An EU-wide set of crisis decision procedures, stretching across all EU institutions was initiated in by the then-Dutch Presidency. Initially titled ICMA integrated crisis management arrangements , when fully implemented the procedures were called the crisis coordination arrangements CCA.

Exercise scenarios include a cruise ship hijacking of national politicians , severe weather destroying European energy hubs on the Mediterranean coast and a hybrid, cyber event paralysing various EU government infrastructures What are all these measures meant to protect?

Other policies are focused on sectors, such as the Transport Network Protection programme or the Energy Infrastructures Protection Programme How Did We Get Here? Public policy approaches and European integration theories provide a ready answer for some of it. Much starts from crises themselves, which serve as the familiar external shock or precipitating event Kingdon, that shakes the status quo and enables new issues to enter the agenda.

These shocks seem to be arriving more frequently and, even if new threats are perceived as much as they are real, they are said to be more complicated of late. Whether we speak of the mass movement of migrants, cyber-attacks, pandemics or climate change-related disasters, crises are becoming more complex by the way they travel through globalized societies, highly technical infra- structures and tightly linked supply chains.

During that window, political symbolism becomes paramount: leaders must be seen to be doing something and Brussels-level initiatives become important. After September 11, several national leaders pushed for a statement to declare their solidarity with the US and to encourage new security measures in Europe.

After the Madrid bombings in March a solidarity dec- laration was adopted at the behest of the Spanish government, demanding additional early warning, intelligence cooperation and deradicalization efforts. During treaty revisions these demands may even make their way into new legal bases. Thus, the solidarity declaration was transformed into a solidarity clause in the Lisbon Treaty Article , Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union stating that Member States had an obligation to help one another in crises.

This move was one of many representing a cycle by which crises are followed by political and strategic declarations by heads of state and government in Brussels. The crisis-political declaration cycle intersects with a second kind of cycle: the use of political declarations by the Commission to advance policy goals.

Political statements, Council conclusions, or initiatives like the solidarity clause usually lead to action plans that summarize what is to be done much of it already underway , by whom and by when. The Commission and agencies use these plans and their periodic endorsement by the Council to build momentum towards policy change, including the many tools, procedures, programmes and resource allocations de- scribed in the section below.

One stems from the fact that much of the cooperation activity described in this article does not require political blessing or a clear legal basis. Thus, in many cases the Commission can create an early warning system or a set of special crisis decision procedures through administrative edicts rather than legislation.

Agencies display a similar dynamic, especially when they have close links to the Commission Groenleer, Even where the Commission briefs the Council on its crisis-related initiatives, in virtually any policy area the Council tends to nod its approval, partly because of the urgency re- lated to crisis dynamics. Moreover, it has been long recognized that much of where the action driving European integration occurs at the bureaucratic, subterranean levels of Brussels Christiansen and Kirchner, Yet the sheer breadth of the developments recorded in this research — beyond the individual policy level — demand ways to under- stand the spread of crisis-oriented behaviour.

Critical security studies approaches warn of the inexorable search for security that tends to characterize modern bureaucracies Aradau and Van Munster, and what happens when risk logics take their place alongside traditional policy logics Hagmann and Cavelty, Those authors examined the single market and the measures adopted to support it, and many of the crisis tools and procedures mentioned above have a similar provenance.

They can be traced back to efforts to make safe broad EU policy projects, such as the Schengen zone, European energy grids, the single European sky, or trans-European transport networks. Another insight provided by critical security studies is the role of available technology as a driver. This 2 A minor but amusing anecdote is the reaction of then-Commissioner for Freedom, Security and Justice during —9, Franco Frattini, to news that other sections of the Commission were building crisis rooms.

He demanded one of his own — albeit with nicer equipment Interview 2. The European Agenda What issues arrive on the European agenda, through which routes, and how do national governments formulate their preferences on those issues? Those questions dominated the early decades of theorizing about European integration, with some authors arguing that na- tional governments exercise strict control on what issues are or are not delegated to the European level after preference formation processes shaped by national politics Moravcsik, Our empirics suggest that the types of issues considered to be European — that is, relevant to supranational decision-making — is subtly expanding.

Even in non-security re- lated sectors, normal issues are sharing the agenda with crisis issues. The effects of climate change, social upheaval, hybrid threats and extreme politics — as Brexit highlights — all generate perturbations in society that governments are pressed to address.

The EU is no exception: crises land on its doorstep more frequently than before. Yet there is an endogenous di- mension to the increasing focus on crises in Europe, too. What demands a European solution is of course entirely intersubjective. The point here is that these systems identify, more readily and clearly than ever before, a broader uni- verse of problems that are ripe for construction into an emerging crisis. Moreover, if a crisis has taken place previously, more intensive monitoring subsequently follows.

Both the ash cloud incident and the red sludge chemical spill in Hungary prompted more intensive monitoring of volcanoes and chem- ical storage facilities, respectively.

Following the mass migration into Europe starting around , it should come as no surprise that extra efforts are being made to monitor the unplanned movements of people in the Middle East and North Africa to anticipate the next surge.

How well can European integration theories explain these trends? Transactionalists would point to cross-border community building amongst actors with a shared view of security and a common identity Deutsch, ; Mitrany, And indeed, a focus on practices, broadly within that same theoretical orientation, helps to illuminate commu- nity-building dynamics that others neglect Adler and Pouliot, Scholars in public administration or public policy studies may identify the entrepreneurs pushing certain is- sues to the supranational level.

But such approaches assume that public policy-making works along conventional lines: long periods of normal policy-making, punctuated by oc- casional crises that reshape the political agenda Baumgartner and Jones, Of course, traditional processes still do take place — and may even remain dominant.

On this point, two security-related bodies of literature are relevant. Security logics change under these conditions as ever more effort is made to control and monitor the risks that society creates for itself. The second relevant body of literature shines light on an ever-extending security agenda driven by discoveries of new risks as anticipatory action. The regular search for new crises crowds out policy space for issues that could have been arrived at through processes of deeper, democratic deliberation.

More bluntly, it is a shift from proactive policy measures to reactive ones. Member States are asked to formulate preferences on issues that have not been generated through public deliberation or public advocacy processes but through technical systems engaged in constantly scanning the horizon.

On a similarly critical note, De Goede et al. How- tional interests. Thus, social democratic thors have addressed the issue of whether social de- governments do not form a cohesive actor at the 1 mocracy is doomed to decline. Sec- the erosion of class-based voting, the declining impor- ond, in most member states governments are formed tance of trade unions, socioeconomic changes, altered by coalitions. In many cases this limits social democ- party competition and coalition opportunities, and the ratic room to maneuver.

Finally, it is questionable ever, European integration not only challenge s tried whether social democratic governments would ever and tested social democratic strategies, but may also challenge the most fundamental and well defended provide opportunities for new political strategies to principles of the Community, the four freedoms and counterbalance the market-liberal orientation of nega- competition law, because this might endanger the tive integration and to regain the ability to act at the Community as a whole.

However, it is exactly these European level supra -national and intergovernmental , sacred principles that constitute the greatest obstacles on the social democratic path to market correction.

Many of them have abandoned Euroscep- pact on policies at the European level. However, they had to wait some their values, programs, and goals, and the particular years until a window of opportunity for European so- interests of their electoral clientele: monetary, tax, em- cial democratic policies opened up in the se cond half ployment and social policy.

In our analysis we focus on the politics of the mem- ber state governments in the Council and the Euro- pean Council.

However, we do not provide an encyclopedic overview, but spotlight the most important decisions. What Has Been Done? As a consequence, they also clearly dominated the Council of the EU, reaching a qualified majority and a Employment Policies qualified double majority. The German presidency of the EU in the first half of marks the height of this Over the last ten years social democratic parties have development. We define "social democratic profile at the end of the s.

This applies democratic parties" by applying the criterion of PES member- ship. These The breakthrough of the European Employment developments coincide d with a slight change in the Strategy can be clearly associated with the social de- strategic preferences of social democratic parties. Since Maastricht, the Book on Growth, Competitiveness and Employment salience of the Europeanization issue in general has Like the Essen Strategy adopted in , the grown markedly, and social democratic parties have White Book was a rather incoherent mix, a compilation taken a clearer pro-European position.

Sweden, Austria and, to a lesser ex- training and lifelong learning, improving the efficiency tent, Finland had social democratic governments and of labor-market institutions, and measures for specific were pursuing pro-welfare-state, active labor-market target groups, such as young people, the long-term policies in their national arenas.

The third enlargement unemployed and women, were given high priority in thus seemed to make the new Community of 15 the EES within a few years. During the intergovernmental course within the PES network, and the effects of conference it became evident that the social democ- compositional change s in some member-state gov- ratic party group did not fully agree on concrete em- ernments.

In addition, Finally, the change of government in some member the perception of economic problems and of feasible states had a major impact on employment policy. At cures changed. In the s the predominantly liberal the end of the s the European Parliament had a and conservative governments had assumed that the progressive social democratic majority, and social de- completion of the Common Market would help to mocratic parties dominated in 11 out of 15 member solve essential employment problems simply by foste r- states.

In the s, European integration was increas- the UK had been the major players vetoing the ingly perceived as being biased: it stressed market and Europeanization of employment policies Tidow The legitimacy of the inte- Germany. Thus, many After a long IGC, in June the member states member state governments increasingly came to be- finally settled on a compromise , in the form of the lieve that a more focused and active European em- Treaty of Amsterdam, that included an employment ployment strategy was necessary.

At an extraordinary summit This altered perception was partly a result of go- on employment in Luxembourg in November , the vernmental changes at the end of the s, though it member states reached agreement on the first em- was not limited to political elites.

At the same time, the ployment guidelines. Thus, two important steps for- political option represented by European employment ward were taken in a coordination process was policies increasingly attracted attention in national established and a European employment policy was electorates.

Eurobarometer data show that from the given substance with the promulgation of the first guidelines. However, this does Trubek Member states are committed to not imply mainly recommodification through tighten- attaining quantitative or qualitative employment goals ing means testing and limiting benefit entitlements. However, this leaves con- through preventive measures, lifelong learning and ac- siderable scope for them to pursue a whole range of tivation actively fostered by the state at different levels, different strategies proposed in the guidelines.

It has gained im- no sanctions may be applied if they do not follow the portance mainly because the concept of activation is guidelines and recommendations. It may induce learning effects, enhance most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based knowledge of alternative strategies and increase the economy in the world, capable of sustainable eco- pressure on national authorities to carry out a change nomic growth with more and better jobs and greater of policies through benchmarking and the help of a social cohesion.

The member states differ widely in respect of their The EES ha s been designed predominantly by social employment problems, welfare state institutions and democratic governments — but not by social democ- labor market regulations. Perceptions of the causes of ratic governments alone. However, reviewing the last persistent unemployment and low employment rates five years, the new European employment policy can and of feasible cures also vary.

This has led to the in- be regarded as a success from a social democratic troduction of heterogeneous guidelines which have point of view. First, after the installation of the em- only partially met social democratic goals and strate- ployment chapter and the EES the European agenda gies in the last five years.

Employment has re- European integration. They are particularly compatible mained a central goal of the Union. All this could be read as indi- marily committed to price stability. Furthermore, it can be terms.

At least, this is the interpretation of neo- seen as an adequate answer to the question of how to Keynesians and some social democratic governments. From a social democratic point of view The European Council, dominated by social democratic the flexibility of the process cannot be judged a disa d- leaders, called for a reduction in interest rates and the vantage.

Uniform, binding European employment poli- introduction of more demand-side measures. The cies would not only ignore differences in the nature of German and French ministers of finance, Dominique employment problems in member states, but also rob Strauss-Kahn and Oskar Lafontaine, explicitly called for social democra tic parties of an electorally important lower interest rates with a view to fundamentally issue see Ladrech — The existing EES transforming monetary policy Lafontaine and Strauss- may help to lower the unemployment rate and en- Kahn ; Lafontaine — After the hance the employment rate and thus allow national change of government in Germany4 Heise credit claiming but to some extent it may also allow the member states agreed the macroeconomic dia- European blame avoidance strategies.

Otherwise, they may ignore demands or block directly to the influential discourse of the PES network the whole coordination process.

Furthermore, the new Ladrech However, today the process has coordination process tends to enhance the political been condemned to insignificance see Heise , importance of the European Council and to circum- and not only because of the difficulties of multilevel vent the European Parliament, national parliaments coordination Hall and Franzese and the declin- and the European Court of Justice. It is questionable ing proportion of social democratic governments in the whether this would be desirable for social democratic Council see Figure 1.

Even social democratic parties parties. The change of policy of icy seems to have been revised not only in Germany see Ostheim —56 but also within the social de- There can be no doubt that Economic and Monetary mocratic party family as a whole. The institutional pean economic strategies see Ostheim — In the meantime, ministers have spoken in favor of a reinterpretation of the criteria in the majority In recent years, criticism of the European monetary and of the EU countries.

Particular national paths tional criteria in the deficit procedure. In , the SGP have had a much stronger influence on public deficits. Chancellor ; Deheija and Genschel We shall concentrate mainly on the commitment to price stability in times of recession or latter: first, because the tax base of other taxes, such stagnation.

Hence, disagreement extent; and second because the most important deci- concerning the SGP has grown dramatically since sions at the European level have been taken on the In light of Within the European Union, different designs of na- these developments, it is not surprising that in Novem- tional tax laws lead, among other things, to tax eva- ber the ECOFIN Council decided against sanc- sion because some member states make strategic use tions by a majority, while four smaller states Austria, of bank-secrecy laws.

A partial reinterpretation of social policies. Second, it has unwanted redis- and multilateral agreements were assigned as condi- tributive effects if the tax burden increases on wages tions for an adjustment. However, only in January compared to capital incomes because taxation on did the Council reach agreement. Cor- 12 EU countries in order to ensure taxation in the recting the defects of tax competition, which violates country of residence.

In European governments were thus able to reach fact, the PES manifesto for the European elec- consensus on this greatly disputed issue.