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MPIfG Working Paper
01/6, September 2001
European
Governance: Common Concerns vs. The Challenge of Diversity*
by Fritz W. Scharpf
Prof. Fritz W. Scharpf is Director at the Max Planck Institute for the Study
of Societies, Cologne.
Abstract
The text is a comment on the White Paper on
"European Governance" presented by the European Commission (COM[2001]
428, 25.7.2001). It begins by confronting the Commission's emphases with the
governance problems that it fails to address, including the unresolved
difficulties of economic-policy coordination among EMU member states, the
adjustments of governance practices required by Eastern enlargement and, above
all, the challenges implied by the fundamental shift of the European agenda -
from the problems of achieving economic integration to the problems of coping
with the consequences of economic integration.
The primary proposals of the White Paper - reducing
the involvement of the Council and the European Parliament in
"details" of legislation and strengthening the role of the Commission
at the expense of member states - would exceed the legitimacy of European
institutions and they would also reduce the problem-solving capacity of European
governance. European policy must be consensual if it is to be effective and
legitimate. Hence it cannot short-circuit the efforts to achieve agreement among
member states, even though it is increasingly confronted with problems for which
uniform, Europe-wide solutions are not acceptable. Regrettably, the White Paper
does not seem to be sufficiently interested in two modes of governance -
"closer cooperation" and "open coordination" - that seem to
have the potential for improving both the effectiveness and legitimacy of
European policy in the face of continuing diversity.
Zusammenfassung
Der Text kommentiert das Weißbuch der Europäischen
Kommission zu Fragen der "European Governance" (KOM[2001] 428,
25.7.2001). Eingangs werden die Vorschläge der Kommission den Problemen des
europäischen Regierens gegenübergestellt, die das Weißbuch nicht behandelt.
Dazu gehören u.a. die ungelösten Probleme der Koordination der nationalen
Wirtschaftspolitik unter den Bedingungen der Währungsunion und die Probleme
einer im Zuge der Osterweiterung erforderliche Differenzierung des europäischen
Acquis. Vor allem aber fehlt jede Auseinandersetzung mit der
grundlegenden Änderung der Anforderungen an die europäische Politik - von der
Vollendung der wirtschaftlichen Integration zur Bewältigung ihrer
Folgeprobleme.
Die Vorschläge des Weißbuchs laufen darauf hinaus,
die Rolle des Ministerrats und des Europäischen Parlaments auf die Festlegung
von Grundsätzen zu beschränken und die Rolle der Kommission auf Kosten der
Mitgliedstaaten wesentlich zu stärken. Eine Umsetzung dieser Vorschläge
müßte jedoch die Grenzen der Legitimation der europäischen Institutionen
überschreiten und zugleich die Problemlösungsfähigkeit der europäischen
Politik vermindern. Die Union könnte die Suche nach einvernehmlichen Lösungen
nicht aufgeben, ohne die Effektivität und Legitimität der europäischen
Politik zu untergraben. Sie ist jedoch zunehmend mit Problemen konfrontiert, die
nicht mehr durch einheitliche Regeln gelöst werden können. Aussichtsreich
wären hier vielleicht zwei neuere Modalitäten der europäischen Politik -
"flexible Kooperation" und "offene Kooperation". Sie
könnten die Erreichung gemeinsamer Ziele trotz heterogener Bedingungen in den
Mitgliedstaaten erleichtern. Leider wird deren Potential im Weißbuch nicht
ausreichend gewürdigt.
Contents
The Commission’s White Paper on European Governance [1] is
as remarkable for what it says as for what it does not say. In combination, the
emphases and the omissions seem to reflect a vision that is defined by the
institutional self-interest of the Commission and its opposition to Member
States and, at the same time, by a remarkable lack of concern about the real
challenges confronting the Union and its Member States. I realize that this may
appear to be an unfair judgment since the authors sought to avoid issues
requiring amendments of the Treaty that might come on the agenda of the next
Intergovernmental Conference (or Constitutional Convention). But even if
recommendations were to be limited to changes permissible under the Treaty, they
still could have been developed in the context of an unconstrained analysis of
the challenges the Union must face.
1 The
Emphasis
The essential elements of the analysis and the
recommendations emphasized in the White Paper can be summarized in a few simple
propositions:
-
On the whole, European integration is a great success.
-
If nevertheless many Europeans "feel alienated
from the Union's work" and if the turnout for elections to the European
Parliament is decreasing, that reflects a perception of European policy as being
either ineffective or excessively detailed and intrusive.
-
Much of this is a problem of either poor public
relations or intentional misrepresentation: "Where the Union does act
effectively, it rarely gets proper credit for its actions", and
"Brussels is too easily blamed by Member States for difficult decisions
that they themselves have agreed or even requested."
-
To the extent that real difficulties do exist, they can
be overcome if the Union is able and willing to "revitalise the Community
method" according to which "everyone should concentrate on their core
tasks: the Commission initiates and executes policy; the Council and the
European Parliament decide on legislation and budgets ... and the European
Parliament controls the execution of the budget and of the Union's
policies" (p. 29).
Compared to present practices, that would require the
following changes:
-
Council and Parliament should limit their involvement
in "primary" European legislation to the definition of "essential
elements ..., leaving the executive" [i.e., the Commission] "to fill
in the technical detail via implementing 'secondary' rules" (p. 20) without
being bothered by national representatives in management or regulatory
"Comitology" procedures (p. 31).
-
The Commission on its part would then promote
"openness" and transparency by providing more (online) information
about all stages of European decision processes; it would promote
"participation" by extending its efforts to involve and consult
subnational and local governments, "civil society" and
"network-led initiatives" in preparing its legislative initiatives;
and it would promote "effectiveness" by collaborating more closely
with affected industries, local and regional governments and "civil
society" in the implementation of European legislation, and by prosecuting
more vigorously national governments that are accused of violating European law.
There is of course more in the text, and much of it is
quite reasonable, but this thumbnail sketch seems to capture the essential
understanding of the institutional problématique and of the strategic
vision promoted by the authors of the White Paper. Their significance, however,
becomes clear only in relation to the issues which are not discussed at all in
the White Paper.
2The
Omissions
I leave out the problems which indeed could only be dealt
with through intergovernmental negotiations - including those associated with
the more effective coordination of foreign policy and the creation and
deployment of a substantial rapid deployment force of EU member states, perhaps
under conditions of "closer cooperation". I will also exclude those
third-pillar problems for which Member States have not yet granted a significant
role to the Commission. But that still leaves a wide range of problems that
could have been, but were not, considered.
Among them are the difficulties caused by the European
Monetary Union. The Irish conflict (which may also have played a role in the
referendum on the Nice Treaty) has highlighted the fundamental problems of
one-size-fits-all interest rates set by the ECB - which turn out to be much too
low for the high-growth Irish economy and much too high for low-growth Germany.
It would have been interesting to read how the Commission sees its role in
facilitating fiscal-policy coordination under conditions of economic diversity.
Should there be effective sanctions against Ireland? Or should each EMU Member
State be allowed to struggle on its own with the consequences of a common
monetary policy that does not fit the national economy - even if that has
external effects on average Euro rates of inflation?
But interesting as these questions may be, they are
overshadowed by the omission of the problems of Eastern enlargement. Here, my
concern is not with the necessary changes of EU decision-making structures (that
were messed up, rather than resolved, at Nice) or with the determination and
allocation of financial burdens which, again, can only be handled by
intergovernmental bargaining. It is with the Commission's role in imposing the acquis
on new Member States that had no voice in its definition and whose economic and
social conditions differ fundamentally from those of the Member States from
whose self-interested bargains these rules had emerged. If they are enforced
with all the legalistic determination of which the Commission and the Court are
capable, the fragile economies of new Member States will be destroyed just as
the East German economy was destroyed when the acquis of the West German
legal order was imposed and enforced without modification. How this consequence
could be avoided without triggering domino effects throughout the EU legal
system is a question that ought to cause sleepless nights to some people in
Brussels - but not, apparently, to the authors of the White Paper.
But, then, the White Paper is generally not interested in
discussing the substantive problems confronting the EU and its Member States at
the present time - and that is an omission with serious consequences for its
definition of governance problems, and even more so for the effectiveness and
legitimacy of their proposed resolution. To put the matter most simply in
game-theoretic terms: For the resolution of pure-coordination problems, all
modes of governance are effective and legitimate; for zero-sum conflicts, by
contrast, only hierarchical authority can ensure a peaceful resolution, and it
can do so only if it is supported by very strong legitimacy beliefs among the
parties involved in the conflict. By failing to address the substantive
challenges facing the EU, the White Paper comes to underestimate the difficulty
of the problems that need to be faced and to overestimate the legitimating power
of the governance procedures that are proposed.
3The
Asymmetric Political Economy of European Integration
The White Paper rightly celebrates the success of European
economic integration - which far exceeds the degree of integration achieved in
the international economy that is provoking the present commotion about
"globalization". It does not seem to realize, however, that with the
completion of the Internal Market and with the creation of the Monetary Union,
the nature of problems on the European agenda has changed radically. Economic
integration and market liberalization have greatly reduced the capacity of
national governments to influence the course of their national economies. At the
same time, the legal constraints of "negative integration" and
European competition law and the ensuing economic pressures of regulatory and
tax competition have drastically reduced the range of economically feasible and
legally permissible policy instruments with which Member States could pursue
non-economic political purposes or deal with politically salient social or
environmental problems. At the national level, therefore, the perceived
impotence of governments in the face of urgent demands and manifest crises
weakens their political support and must eventually undermine the political
legitimacy of Member States. Under these circumstances, it was inevitable that
national actors have increasingly come to demand European solutions to the
"spillover" problems created by European economic integration. As it
turns out, however, these demands are largely frustrated by a basic asymmetry
between market-creating and market-correcting policies at the European level.
Market integration, though never completely conflict-free,
was a shared goal that by and large could be realized through Europe-wide and
uniform rules of negative integration, liberalization and harmonization. Many of
these policies could be imposed unilaterally by the Commission and the Court in
their roles as "guardians of the Treaty" and enforcers of the maxims
of "undistorted competition" or, where they depend on Council
directives, they could count on the support of producers and consumers in all
Member States who expected to benefit from access to the larger European market.
By contrast, market-correcting European regulations are as likely to be opposed
by business interests as is true at the national level. Moreover, the
social-protection and environmental interests that would often prevail over
business interests nationally are less well represented in European bargaining
processes. What matters more, however, is that even where these interests could
politically prevail over business opposition, they are likely to be divided at
the European level.
One reason is the difference between rich and poor member
states: Firms, workers and consumers in Portugal or Greece, let alone in Poland
or Hungary, simply could not afford environmental or social standards at a level
that Danish or Dutch voters consider essential. Even more important, however, is
the divergence of existing welfare-state and industrial-relations institutions
and the high political salience of divergent national policy legacies. Voters in
Britain simply could not accept the high levels of taxation that sustain the
generous Swedish welfare state; Swedish families could not live with the low
level of social and educational services provided in Germany; and German doctors
and patients would unite in protest against any moves toward a British-style
National Health System.
In short, successful European policies of economic integration and market
liberalization have resulted in a fundamental asymmetry in the European
political economy: Though the pressures of regulatory and tax competition give
rise to increasingly urgent demands for more effective market-correcting
policies at the European level, agreement on effective European solutions is
most difficult precisely for those problems about which the citizens of Member
States care the most. The White Paper, unfortunately, gives no indication that
its authors are aware of this fundamental change in the dominant problématique
- and if they were, they certainly did not appreciate its implications for the
institutions and procedures of European governance. In fact, if the central
recommendations of the White Paper were adopted and applied to the issues
discussed here, the outcome would not be effective problem solving but a
veritable legitimacy crisis.
4The
Narrow Constraints of European Governance by Majority Rule
Like the proverbial generals who are always fighting the
last war, the White Paper's proposals to "revitalise the Community
method" make a lot of sense when hypothetically applied to the problems of
the past. Economic integration could indeed have been achieved more quickly and
more efficiently if Parliament and Council had restricted their involvement to
the definition of the "essential principles" of legislation proposed
by the Commission, if the Council had been ready to "vote as soon as a
qualified majority seems possible rather than pursuing discussions in the search
for unanimity" (p. 22), and if the Commission would then have been
allowed to define the "technical detail" without being encumbered by
Comitology procedures. When applied to, say, the definition of work-safety
standards in the Machinery Directive, or of common rules governing the solvability
requirements for insurance companies, legitimacy would not have been much of a
problem since the common interest of producers and service providers in gaining
access to the larger European market would have ensured the acceptance of any
reasonable Europe-wide rule even if national industries and their governments
might have preferred differing solutions at the level of "technical
detail".
But what if these differences were to have high political
salience for national constituencies? Think of recent efforts to reform national
pension systems, where even minute technical details could have a significant
impact on the life chances of individuals and hence were the object of fierce
battles among interest groups and political parties, or would even provoke
violent protests that could jeopardize a government's survival. If such issues
were indeed to be settled by the "Community method" and majority rule
at the European level, the lack of legitimacy could blow the Union apart.
It is worrying that the authors of the White Paper seem to
be happily unaware of any legitimacy constraints on European institutions. Thus,
they assert twice that their recommendations merely concern the way in which
"the Union uses the powers given by its citizens" (p. 3, 8),
and they are emphatic in postulating that "it is time to recognize that the
Union has moved from a diplomatic to a democratic process..." (p.
29). The first of these statements is of course not even a self-serving
euphemism. It is simply wrong. The powers the Union is able to exercise were
either delegated by the governments of Member States or they were usurped by the
Commission and the Court through interpretations of Treaty provisions that
exceeded the original intent of contracting governments. Whether, and in what
way, "citizens" should finally get a say in all this is a question
considered with much fear and trembling (even more so after the Irish
referendum) in the beginning debate on a European "Constitution". For
the time being, at any rate, the powers of the Union rest on intergovernmental
agreement and a passive respect for "the law" - neither of which are
solid rocks to stand on if European policies should violate intense national
preferences.
The same objection would have to be raised against the
White Paper's reference to "a democratic process" if that should imply
majority rule. Voting by qualified majority has become a useful device for
speeding up Council decisions in constellations where the divergence of policy
preferences does not have high political salience in national constituencies.
When that is not the case, however, member governments have very good practical
and normative reasons to invest time and effort in the search for consensual
solutions. On practical grounds, the shadow of the future is long, and
governments should hesitate to antagonize others when they may find themselves
in the same corner tomorrow. On normative grounds, moreover, legitimate majority
rule would presuppose a strong European collective identity, vigorous
Europe-wide public debates, and the manifest political accountability of
European governors. None of these preconditions is as yet realized in the
present European Union, let alone in the Union after Eastern enlargement. That
is not meant to discourage efforts that would gradually create the preconditions
of democratic legitimacy and majority rule at the European level. For the time
being, however, Europe cannot operate as a majoritarian democracy, and European
policy must be consensual if it is to be legitimate.
5The
Heroic Commission
However, the main emphasis in the White Paper is not on
majority rule and the democratization of the Union; it is on enlarging the role
of the Commission at the expense of the roles of governments of the Member
States. Nevertheless, some of the practical and normative objections just
mentioned apply here as well. The critical proposal would restrict the
legislative role of the Parliament and the Council to a definition of
"essential principles", and then leave the specification of
"technical detail" to the unfettered discretion of the Commission.
Given the diversity of economic conditions, political cultures, institutional
structures, policy legacies and public attention among Member states, it seems
inevitable that many policy choices below the level of "essential
principles" will have high political salience and might be totally
unacceptable in one country or another. At present, these pitfalls are avoided
by the search for consensual solutions that avoid incompatibilities with
specific national constraints in elaborate intergovernmental negotiations that
take place in the preparatory phase before a Council decision as well as in the
implementation phase.
In the preparatory phase, this search is carried on in the
multitude of specialized committees organized by the Council Secretariat whose
deliberations are then fed into the Committee of Permanent Representatives
(COREPER), where most potential conflicts among member governments are ironed
out before they reach the Council agenda. The White Paper, however, proposes
that the Commission should protect the integrity of its legislative initiatives
by withdrawing them whenever the outcome of "inter-institutional bargaining
would undermine ... the proposal's objectives" (p. 22). In other words, the
Commission is threatening to use its Treaty-based monopoly of legislative
initiatives in order to short-circuit consensus-seeking procedures and to
confront the Council and the Parliament with take-it-or-leave-it propositions.
Of equal importance is the phase of
"implementing" Council decisions that need further specifications
before they can be directly applied. This function could be performed by the
Council itself, it may be delegated to the Commission, or it may be left to
Member States. In practice, delegation to the Commission has become the
preferred procedure, but it is generally combined with the establishment of a
"Comitology" committee in which regulations proposed by the Commission
need to be discussed with civil servants and experts nominated by member
governments. In two of the variants of Comitology (which the White Paper would
abolish), "management committees" and "regulatory
committees" that disagree with a Commission proposal have the possibility
of appealing to the Council for a final decision. Even though that option is
almost never used in practice, it acts as a "fleet in being" that
forces the Commission to take objections seriously and to search for consensual
solutions in the implementation phase as well. It is precisely this function
that the White Paper proposes to eliminate by abolishing management and
regulatory committees (p. 31).
The White Paper is of course right in suggesting that the
outcomes of consensus-building procedures leave much to be desired if judged by
efficiency criteria. Decision processes are cumbersome and slow, and their
outcomes are likely to be sub-optimal in one of two characteristic ways: On the
one hand, high aspirations of original Commission initiatives are likely to be
watered down because of the need to eliminate provisions that would violate
specific national concerns. On the other hand, originally lean Commission drafts
may become bloated because of the need to accommodate cumulative requests for
the insertion of additional provisions satisfying specific national demands.
Moreover, European decision processes tend to be over-specialized and hence
poorly coordinated. In short, the European policies produced by
consensus-seeking procedures are often of a kind which not even their
progenitors could love, and it is also true that the Commission or
"Brussels", rather than national governments, generally gets to be
blamed for them. It is easy to sympathize, therefore, with the desire of the
Commission to liberate itself from these uncomfortable constraints. But it must
also be obvious to anybody outside of the Commission that the solution proposed
by the White Paper - which would essentially replace consensus-seeking
procedures with unilateral powers of the Commission - cannot work in practice
and would not be normatively acceptable if it did.
At a practical level, the Commission's threat to withdraw
initiatives when they are in danger of being changed by intergovernmental
negotiations would backfire if the Council, or even a blocking minority of
member governments, would equally reject all Commission initiatives which, in
their original form, do not respond to the objections and demands that would
otherwise be introduced in consensus-seeking negotiations. In other words, in a
decision system with multiple veto positions, confrontation strategies can in
principle be played by all parties - and if they are played by all, gridlock is
the most likely outcome. By the same token, it is hard to see how the Commission
could force Member States to accept the abolition of the Comitology system and
to leave legislative choices in the "implementation" stage entirely to
its own discretion.
But apart from practicalities, the White Paper's proposals
would be problematic from a normative point of view. They would explicitly and
visibly destroy what is left of the indirect-democratic legitimation of European
policies that is derived from the agreement of democratically elected national
governments, and they would do nothing at all to strengthen either the direct
responsibility of the European Parliament for substantive policy choices or the
political accountability of the Commission to Parliament (assuming, for the sake
of argument, that politically salient European policy choices could be
legitimated by votes taken in the present EP). In short, the greatly enhanced
role of the Commission envisaged by the White Paper is not that of a faithful
agent of either the Council or the Parliament. Instead, what the authors have in
mind would amount to the creation of a benevolent dictatorship.
To be sure, it is meant to be a well-informed, highly
sensitive and very open form of dictatorship. With regard to the preparation of
policy initiatives, the White Paper is replete with promises of more
communication, wider involvement, participation and consultation and (in a
remarkable reversal of the assignment of principal-agent roles in democratic
theory) it even proposes that the Commission should take care that "civil
society itself must follow the principles of good governance, which include
accountability and openness" (p. 15). In return, the Commission would allow
privileged "partnership arrangements" involving "additional
consultation" with civil society organizations that conform to its
requirements (p. 17) - without, however, committing itself to binding
"corporatist" agreements. The list of potential partners the authors
have in mind is truly comprehensive, including the Economic and Social
Committee, the Committee of Regions, individual regions, cities and localities,
trade unions and employers' associations, professional associations, churches
and charities, network-led initiatives and grass roots organizations -
practically everything and everybody one could think of or wish for if
Commission manpower, time and attention were not scarce resources. But since
these are in fact extremely scarce resources, one cannot but wonder what would
happen if the Commission's invitations were taken seriously by most, or
even by many of the "civil-society" actors all over Europe to whom
they seem to be addressed. Or, since not a word is lost on the practicalities of
Europe-wide participation, one might wonder about the seriousness of the
invitation itself.
It is also worth noting, however, that democratically
legitimated national governments are not included among the lists of
participants whom the Commission intends to consult in the preparation of its
legislative initiatives. On the implementation side, the White Paper similarly
envisages more intense partnership relations between the Commission and
non-governmental organizations. Thus, co-regulation arrangements are supposed to
allow "the actors most concerned" (presumably, industrial
associations) to take responsibility for the preparation and enforcement of
rules within a framework of "binding legislative action". In order to
qualify, the organizations participating "must be representative,
accountable and capable of following open procedures in formulating and applying
agreed rules" (p. 21). Here, however, national and subnational governments
(which meet all these criteria, or so one should think) would also get a role in
"target-based tripartite contracts" involving a Member State, a
regional or local authority and the Commission in which the subnational
authority would undertake to realize particular objectives in the implementation
of primary legislation (p. 13). In this case, national governments would be held
responsible for the implementation of the contract - but there is no question
that its terms would be defined by the Commission. Since these target-based
contracts would necessarily have to be selective, one wonders what they would do
to the integrity of orderly national structures of regional and local government
and administration, or what it would cost to bribe national governments into
sharing what authority they may have over regional and local governments with
the Commission.
None of my comments are meant to deny that the White Paper
includes many useful suggestions. What is basically wrong with its vision,
however, is the image it projects of the Commission as the lone hero of European
policy making and implementation - a role that is reminiscent of French-style
executive centralization, but for whose emulation the Commission lacks both
legitimacy and institutional capacity at the center and effective control over
an efficient administrative infrastructure at regional and local levels. This
heroic self-image of the Commission seems to be complemented by a deep distrust
of Member States, whose role in policy making and implementation the White Paper
seeks to have reduced or bypassed wherever possible. In my view, this reflects
not only an inflated image of the Commission's capabilities but also a
disturbing lack of understanding of the preconditions of successful multilevel
governance in Europe.
6Multilevel
Europe: Constraining and Enabling
The White Paper seems to imply that multilevel
interactions in the European polity are zero-sum confrontations in which the
Commission must try to maximize its role in legislation and implementation at
the expense of Member States, and where national governments are continually
engaged in blocking, reversing and blaming the Commission. There is reason to
think that this confrontational view is a legacy of the dominance of
"negative integration" in the history of European integration. Once
the basic political commitments to market integration had been adopted in the
Treaty of Rome and, again, in the Single European Act, it was for the Commission
and the Court, acting as "guardians of the Treaty", to define and to
implement the common project; and it was plausible for the Commission to see
itself as the taskmaster whose job it was to cajole, blackmail or compel
recalcitrant or protectionist Member States to accept the concrete implications
of what they had already agreed to in the abstract.
The present European agenda, however, is no longer about
the further perfection of uniform rules of market integration. It is about
coping with the problems and constraints that the integration of European
markets has created for Member States in policy areas which so far have not been
Europeanized themselves. These problems are manifest in the societies and
economies of Member States, rather than at the European level. Nevertheless,
since it is so massively contributing to problems at the national level, Europe
is inescapably confronted with expectations that it should also be part of the
solution.
These expectations correspond with the historical
experience of federal nation states where the growing integration of national
economies was going hand in hand with the adoption of uniform social and
environmental regulations, welfare-state policies and taxes at the federal
level. But such parallels are misleading because, for the reasons discussed
above, uniform European rules could not be legitimately imposed on the divergent
problems, institutions and policy legacies of EU Member States. If Europe is
nevertheless to be part of the solution, it can only be so in an enabling role
which must support and strengthen, rather than undermine, the political
legitimacy, institutional integrity and problem-solving capacity of its Member
States. But what could be done if uniform legislation cannot be the solution? In
the present institutional framework of the Union, there are in fact two
innovative options - "closer cooperation" and "open
coordination" - that might be useful here and whose potential is hardly
explored in the White Paper.
6.1Closer
Cooperation
The provisions allowing for closer cooperation among
groups of Member States did become a bit more practicable under the Nice Treaty.
Further changes would be required, however, before it would be possible for
groups of countries facing similar problems, that differ from the problems
confronting other member states, to make use of the instruments of Community
legislation. If that were possible, it would indeed be conceivable that Member
States trying to cope with the problems of reforming "Bismarckian"
pay-as-you-go public pension systems might develop common solutions even if
these would not apply to Member States relying to a large extent on either
tax-financed basic pensions or funded public or private pensions. Similarly,
Member States with national health systems might benefit from common solutions
that would not apply in countries relying on compulsory insurance for the
financing of privately provided health care, and vice versa. Moreover, if it
were found to be necessary to relax the rigidities of the acquis for new
accession states after Eastern enlargement, "closer cooperation" could
provide common solutions that would not open the flood gates of ad-hoc
discretion. It seems puzzling that the Commission is not actively promoting
closer cooperation as an instrument that would accommodate a moderate degree of
diversity without relaxing the controls of the "Community method".
6.2Open
Coordination
The "open method of coordination" goes much
further in accommodating diversity. As it was introduced in the Employment Title
of the Amsterdam Treaty (and extended to certain social-policy areas by the
Lisbon Summit), the method presupposes that Member States should define certain
policy targets as a "common concern" whereas the actual choice of
policies remains a national responsibility. What matters is that the policies
responding to jointly defined targets are presented in annual "national
action plans", that outcomes are evaluated in a permanent committee of
senior civil servants, and that on the basis of these evaluations the Council
may address specific recommendations to individual Member States. In this, the
role of the Commission is important in providing benchmarking information and
comparative analyses that identify the relative performance and the specific
problems of individual countries as well as national solutions that seem to be
particularly successful.
It is of course too early to evaluate the effectiveness of
the open method of coordination, but it is clear that it is viewed with a
jaundiced eye by the authors of the White Paper. While its usefulness for
"allowing Member States to compare their efforts and learn from the
experience of others" is acknowledged, the emphasis is clearly on
containment: "The open method of co-ordination must not dilute the
achievement of common objectives in the Treaty or the political responsibility
of the Institutions. It should not be used when legislative action under the
Community method is possible" (but why not?) and "the Commission
should be closely involved and play a co-ordinating role" (p. 22). Quite
obviously, the authors fear that the Commission could lose ground in its turf
battle against national governments.
When viewed from a less self-centered perspective,
however, the open method of coordination could hold considerable promise. By
requiring national governments to focus on a common problem, and to consider
their own policy choices in relation to this problem and in a comparative
perspective and, even more important, by exposing their performance to peer
review and public scrutiny, open coordination should not only provide favorable
conditions for "learning through monitoring" (Charles Sable), but it
may even provide opportunities for shaming governments out of
"beggar-my-neighbor" strategies that would be self-defeating if
everybody did adopt them. Contrary to the assumptions of the White Paper,
however, the full potential of open coordination may be realized precisely in
policy areas where "legislative action under the Community method is
possible". I will mention only two plausible applications that come to
mind:
First, assume that Council and Parliament would heed the
White Paper's injunction to reduce legislation to "essential
elements", but that - instead of leaving the formulation of more specific
regulations to the Commission and Comitology processes - implementation would be
delegated to Member States. Without more, that would correspond to the model of
"framework directives" which the White Paper suggests should be used
more often (p. 20). If they are not often used in present practice, the reason
may be distrust of the protectionist or beggar-my-neighbor practices of Member
States, or simply a lack of mutual understanding of the operation of
institutionally differing national political and administrative systems. But
what if national implementation were coupled with a process of open coordination
in which Member States would have to announce what they intend to do, in which
their performance would be monitored by the Commission and evaluated by peer
review, and in which more precise Council legislation or decisions in response
to manifest problems of deficient implementation would remain a realistic
prospect? Under these conditions, the diversity of implementing regulations
could increase, rather than undermine, the effectiveness of European
legislation.
Or take as a second possibility the implementation of
structural funds where the Commission is deeply involved in the processes of
defining, selecting and managing programs at the regional and local level -
which makes for extremely cumbersome bureaucratic procedures and often wreaks
havoc with the integrity of administrative institutions and practices at
national and subnational levels. But what if the Union were merely to allocate
lump-sum grants to economically disadvantaged Member States while defining broad
purposes for which regional subsidies (regardless of their source) should be
used? In that case, the effectiveness of national solutions could be monitored
through processes of open coordination in which national (or subnational) action
plans, benchmarking, peer review and potential Council decisions would take the
place of both the present involvement of the Commission in attempts at
co-administration and the exceedingly restrictive prosecution of state aids
under the rules of European competition law.
If employed "in the shadow of legislation", open
coordination could indeed help to resolve some of the most serious problems
addressed in the White Paper. It would allow European legislation to avoid the
excessive detail which, even though it is product of their own demands, vexes
Member State parliaments and administrations even more than it seems to irritate
the Commission - and it would do so without requiring the wholesale delegation
of legislative competencies to an "executive" (the Commission) that
cannot be held politically accountable for its policy choices. Instead,
responsibility for those policy choices that cannot or should not be made
directly by the "political" institutions of the Union (Council and
Parliament) would be left to Member States, where they would become the
responsibility of politically accountable national and subnational governments.
These policy choices, however, would not be those of sovereign,
"Westphalian" nation states. They would be taken in an institutional
setting in which "common concerns" are integrated into the preference
function of national and subnational actors, and in which the effectiveness of
nationally divergent solutions needs to be demonstrated in comparative analyses
under conditions of peer review. The Council, moreover, would remain as a fleet
in being that could intervene, by decisions taken by qualified majority, against
specific deficiencies and the "beggar-my-neighbor" practices of
individual Member States.
If these conditions were met, the Europe-wide uniformity
of rules and practices would cease to be the litmus test of successful
integration, and Member States would not need to march in step to the bark of
the Commission's drill sergeant to demonstrate that they are good Europeans.
Instead, they could respond to the specific problems they are facing with
solutions that are compatible with their specific policy legacies and that can
be implemented within their existing institutional framework. At the same time,
however, national policy choices would be disciplined by the challenge to
achieve jointly defined targets and by the institutionalized need to consider
their impact on other Member States. In short, in developing the open method of
coordination, the Union may have discovered a constructive approach to dealing
with the growing pressure for European solutions under conditions of politically
salient diversity.
There is of course no reason to consider these methods a
panacea. There is still a need for uniform standards ensuring the access of
traded goods and services to the markets of all Member States, and there must
also be a place for the centralized enforcement of rules against protectionist
practices that distort economic competition among Member States. At the same
time, there is a growing need for the Union to speak and act in a unified and
effective way towards the rest of the world, in trade negotiations and
development policy as well as in the policy areas included in the second and
third pillars of the EU Treaty. But centralization and uniformity are not values
in themselves, and the European Union will not be able to cope with its present
problems and the difficulties of Eastern enlargement unless it finds ways to
realize common concerns while accommodating diversity and respecting the
institutional integrity and political autonomy of its Member States in all
matters where uniformity and centralization are not necessary or not possible,
and which still cannot be left to the unfettered discretion of nationally myopic
Member States. It is unfortunate that the White Paper has chosen to ignore these
challenges.
Endnotes
* This paper is
intended for a collection of comments, organized by the Robert
Schuman Centre of the European University Institute,
Florence, on the Governance White Paper of the European
Commission. Helpful suggestions by Gerda Falkner are
gratefully acknowledged.
1 Commission of the
European Communities, 2001: European Governance. A White
Paper. COM (2001) 428 final. Brussels: CEC.
<http://europa.eu.int/eur-lex/en/com/cnc/2001/com2001_0428en01.pdf>
Copyright © 2001 Fritz W. Scharpf
No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted without permission in writing from the author.
Jegliche Vervielfältigung und Verbreitung, auch auszugsweise, bedarf der
Zustimmung des Autors.
MPI für Gesellschaftsforschung, Paulstr. 3, 50676 Köln,
Germany
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