Working Papers 2011
Marcin Dabrowski
WP 05/2011
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The ongoing debate about the future of EU cohesion policy includes the voices of critics questioning its effectiveness, as well as those praising its contribution to regional development policy. The proponents specifically acclaim its enhancement of inter-institutional cooperation and coordination in the delivery of the regional development policy through the partnership principle. However, the legacy of centralism, lack of traditions in collaborative policy-making, and weakly institutionalized sub-national authorities in Central and Eastern Europe prompt questions about the transferability of the partnership approach to the new member states, the main recipients of cohesion funding. What is the impact of EU cohesion policy's partnership at the sub-national level? What are the mechanisms of the sub-national actors' adjustment to this EU-imposed practice and what is the scope for its institutionalization? By investigating sub-national partnership arrangements in Poland, the paper sheds light on these under-researched issues. It also offers a valuable contribution to the debates on the future of EU cohesion policy and the logic of the domestic policy actors' adjustment to externally imposed policy norms.
The paper draws on the concept of Europeanization, understood as the domestic impact of EU policies, to examine the implementation of a horizontal partnership in an unprecedented way by focusing on the strategies, preferences, and attitudes of the sub-national actors involved. It reveals that initially their adjustment to EU cohesion policy's partnership tends to be strategic and interest-driven. Nevertheless, there is also evidence that partnership can be internalized over time provided that it is in line with the actors' interests and there are specific incentives for cooperation. These findings show that strategic adjustment of domestic actors to European policy framework does not exclude socialization and internalization of the related norms and practices, as these processes can indeed be intertwined.
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WP 05/2011 [pdf]
Marise Cremona
WP 04/2011
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The EU's policy on Justice and Home Affairs has as its objective the establishment of the Union as 'an area of freedom, security and justice with respect for fundamental rights and the different legal systems and traditions of the Member States'. How does this essentially internal objective translate into international action? How does the Union respond, in an internal policy field, to external challenges?
This paper will assess the ambitions and the reality of the external dimension of the EU's policy of Justice and Home Affairs from two perspectives. The first is the close link between internal and external objectives and policies, and the implications for both EU competence and policy priorities. The second is the progressive constitutionalisation of the JHA field, its transformation from inter-governmental cooperation into a policy domain subject to the political and judicial accountability of ordinary legislative procedures.
The paper is structured around a case study of the negotiation, renegotiation and eventual conclusion of the EU-US Agreement on the transfer of financial messaging data for the purpose of combating terrorism (the 'SWIFT' Agreement), and in particular the interplay thereby revealed between
(i) different regulatory approaches to data protection in the context of international commercial transactions and the needs of private commercial undertakings;
(ii) different (EU) institutional actors in the context of international action against terrorism where the EU needs to be seen as an effective actor and partner of the US; and
(iii) the needs of public security and the need to provide against the risk of breaches of individual rights of data protection and privacy through the misuse of security-based powers.
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WP 04/2011 [pdf]
Gerda Falkner
WP 03/2011
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The EU's founding fathers had the protection of the EU's constituent units as a key concern and set up serious hurdles to policy innovation in the absence of unanimous governmental agreement. These institutional design features, aptly characterised as "joint-decision trap" by Fritz W. Scharpf, were only softened but not erased over time. Nonetheless, the problem of how to innovate has, at times, been overcome through eclectic means. There are indeed some well known and quite visible practices as well as some less expected and more obscure strategies that have propelled the EU's policy system beyond what has for a long time been expected.
This paper argues that there are two strategic moves the European Commission (and, at times, other supranational actors such as the European Court of Justice) can use to actively overcome member state opposition: first, sidelining some or even all national governments; and, second, manipulating relevant policy preferences. These two basic strategies can be seen to interconnect the diverging basic assumptions of intergovernmentalism and neofunctionalism as 'passerelles'.
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WP 03/2011 [pdf]
Jolyon Howorth
WP 02/2011
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The European Union is gradually emerging as a global actor, a role which the Lisbon Treaty aims to enhance. Yet the global order is changing rapidly, from the uni-polarity of the post-Cold War years to some inchoate form of multi-polarity. In that emerging world, both the traditional and the rising powers face huge responsibilities in defining the contours of a consensual new order which will deal effectively with the inter-connected challenges of the 21st century: regional stability, arms control, environmental protection, energy security, climate change, poverty and inequality and migratory flows. Most of the global actors are centralized nation states with well-defined national strategies. The EU faces additional obstacles in generating a "grand strategy" which effectively articulates the relationship between means and large ends. Yet in many ways, the EU has already trail-blazed the type of world order which appears to be emerging, one in which international law and institutions are primary, in which the limited utility of military power is recognized, in which failing states are more destabilizing than powerful ones and in which human security is as important as state security. If the EU can begin to address these problems with strategic clarity, it can have an important role to play in the striking of the grand bargains necessary to underpin the new world order. If it fails to define a grand strategy, it will be increasingly marginalized from the global stage.
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WP 02/2011 [pdf]
Tanja Börzel
WP 01/2011
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This paper focuses on new modes of governance in the EU’s attempts to impact upon states, which are not (yet) members and which have become members in the 1980s. More specifically, I seek to explore the role of new modes of governance for the implementation of EU policies and EU primary Law in different types of states, “weak states” in particular, including Southern European member states, CEE candidate countries and associated states in the former Soviet Union and Northern Africa. To what extent have new modes of governance helped weak states that lack sufficient capacities to adopt and implement domestic reforms to comply with EU norms and rule cope with the challenge of accession and approximation to the EU?
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WP 01/2011 [pdf]
Working Papers 2010
Dimiter Toshkov
Moritz Knoll
Lisa Wewerka
WP 10/2010
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This paper is an accompanying text to the Compliance Database – the database of case studies of transposition, implementation, and compliance with EU law. ( http://www.eif.oeaw.ac.at/compliance/). The database contains the results from the literature survey in a form that enables detailed overviews of individual studies as well as easy comparisons across studies. The database has been developed with the support of the Institute for European Integration Research at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and it is a free and regularly updated resource. The conclusions of this paper are based as much on the inferences that the database offers, as on the original articles and books that have been reviewed.
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WP 10/2010 [pdf]
Radoslaw Zubek
Katarina Staronova
WP 09/2010
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This paper argues that the extent to which national administrations transpose EU directives in a timely fashion may be related to how transposition is coordinated inside national ministries. Focusing on transposition through secondary legislation in Estonia, Poland and Slovenia, the paper finds initial evidence that oversight can contribute to better transposition performance. Ministries with strong internal oversight tend to be better at timely transposition, while ministries with no or weak oversight perform worse. The results tend to hold if one controls for country effects, party preferences and transposition workload.
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WP 09/2010 [pdf]
Zdenek Kudrna
WP 08/2010
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This paper analyzes the reasons for the failure of the multilateral resolution of EU cross-border banks such as Fortis. We argue that the pre-crisis regime based on soft law and voluntary coordination was unable to align the incentives of national authorities acting under the time pressure and uncertainty of a banking crisis. We ask whether this experience induced the Commission to propose reforms that would close the regulatory gap between integrated cross-border banks and national resolution regimes. Although, the Commission proposals submitted within a year of the crisis considered the more radical reform options, such as shifting the regime to the EU level or reorganizing cross-border banks so that they could be resolved on the national level, in the end the Commission supported the traditional reform path of deepening soft law and strengthening pre-crisis governance arrangements. At the same time, the new financing mechanisms introduced to stabilize the Eurozone can pave the way for the introduction of an EU-level bank resolution regime, when the next reform opportunity arises.
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WP 08/2010 [pdf]
Lukas Schweiger
WP 07/2010
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This paper seeks to analyse the evolution of the EU Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) as a Community tool for the management of a common-pool resource in the context of European integration. The theoretical framework, comprising different levels of analysis, employs European integration theories (Neo-Functionalism and Liberal Intergovernmentalism), paradigms of fisheries management (conservation, economic and social/community) and the concept of common goods.
Spillover contributed to the development of the two pillars of the original policy, the structural policy and the common market organisation, which was complemented by a resource conservation regime and a common external policy regarding fisheries. Also, the European Court of Justice has played a significant role in confirming the supremacy of Community law in this field. At the same time, domestic interests in several Member States led to the extenuation of Commission proposals and to perennial stalemates, also due to the Luxembourg Compromise and especially in negotiations on distributive matters. Furthermore, since the adoption of the first CFP in 1970, overdue reforms have not been undertaken (particularly the introduction of individual transferable quotas as a market-based management tool and a definitive end to subsidising overcapacity). Partial reforms, especially concerning equal access, enshrined the status quo through repeatedly renewing derogations, thereby making them de facto permanent.
The CFP has evidently failed to prevent the Tragedy of the Commons as most major fish stocks in Community waters are far below their 1983 levels, the year the common conservation regime went into effect. This trend has been exacerbated not only due to the CFP's ambiguous objectives that stem from its common heritage with the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) but also through a tendency of the policy to be oriented toward the social/community paradigm of fisheries management.
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WP 07/2010 [pdf]
Gerda Falkner
WP 06/2010
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Going beyond the traditional “compliance” debate that is still ongoing in various journals and geared towards a specialized political science sub-community, this paper focuses on the wider social reform issues arising from the finding that there are serious compliance problems almost everywhere in the EU, particularly when enforcement and application of the standards are considered and not only formal transposition into domestic law.
This article presents in brief the findings from two large-scale research projects on (non-)compliance with EU law in two sub-fields of social policy, working time and equal treatment policies. Two teams of co-authors studied the "old" EU15 plus later four countries from Central and Eastern Europe: the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia and Slovenia.
Four "worlds of compliance" were discussed on the basis of our findings from the 102 overall qualitative case studies. Searching for ways to improve the state of social affairs, it seems useful to build on these differential procedural modes of implementation and to draw up tailor-made recommendations of potential use for those fighting compliance problems, such as the European Commission.
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WP 06/2010 [pdf]
Vivien A. Schmidt
WP 05/2010
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The problems of identity and legitimacy in the EU are significant, but tangentially interconnected. The problems for EU identity derive not solely from the fact that European citizens have not developed much sense of being European because they have not been doing a lot in the EU; it is also that national elites have not been saying much about what the EU has been doing—except in moments of crisis. The problems for legitimacy derive not only from the ways in which the EU works—with more emphasis on ‘output’ for the people and ‘throughput’ with’ the people than ‘input’ by and of the people. It is also that the EU’s development challenges nationally constructed identities at the same time that it alters the traditional workings of national democracy. And this in turn adds to problems for citizen identification with the EU and their perceptions of its legitimacy. So the question is: would politicizing the EU help build more identity and legitimacy? Or would this only increase the problems?
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WP 05/2010 [pdf]
Michael Joos
WP 04/2010
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Dieses Arbeitspapier stellt eine Diplomarbeit an der Universität Wien dar, die auf Anregung
der Direktorin und mit Unterstützung des EIF entstand. Die Liberalisierung verschiedener
Wirtschaftssektoren durch die EU ist in ihren Rückwirkungen auf Österreich noch bei weitem
nicht ausreichend studiert, und Fragen der Implementierung von EU-Politiken stellen einen
Schwerpunktbereich der Arbeit des EIF dar.
Wenngleich eine abschließende Beurteilung gerade des Spannungsfeldes zwischen De- und Re-Regulierung
sowie zwischen Gemeinwohlzielen einerseits und Marktprinzipien andererseits fraglos aufbauender
Studien bedarf, empfiehlt sich meines Erachtens die Zurverfügungstellung der vorliegenden
Arbeit für die wissenschaftliche und politische Öffentlichkeit, was in dieser Form eines
EIF - Working Papers gewährleistet werden soll.
Gerda Falkner
(Direktorin des EIF)
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WP 04/2010 [pdf]
Alexandra Lamprecht
WP 03/2010
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Deliberative Demokratiemodelle nehmen in der theoretischen Diskussion um die Partizipation
zivilgesellschaftlicher AkteurInnen einen bedeutenden Stellenwert ein. Dieser Artikel stellt
die normative Annahme der deliberativen Polyarchie, Nichtregierungsorganisationen seien integraler
Bestandteil neuer politischer Gestaltungsprozesse, ihren tatsächlichen Parti-zipationsmöglichkeiten
gegenüber. Anhand der Einbindung von NROs in die Offene Metho-de der Koordinierung zur sozialen
Eingliederung in Österreich wird analysiert, ob ihre Mit-arbeit die normativen Erwartungen
der deliberativen Polyarchie erfüllt. Weiters legt der Artikel offen, dass das Verständnis
politischer und administrativer EntscheidungsträgerIn-nen von jener Rolle, die NROs im Prozess
einnehmen sollen, klassischen liberalen Demokra-tievorstellungen entspricht und damit einer
deliberativen Einbindung von NROs im Wege steht.
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WP 03/2010 [pdf]
Heinrich Schneider
WP 02/2010
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Dieses Arbeitspapier fällt insofern etwas „aus der Reihe“, als es die erweitere Fassung
eines Vortrags und kein typisches Forschungspapier darstellt. Diese Ausnahme scheint mir
dadurch gerechtfertigt, daß der Autor niemand geringerer ist als der Doyen der Europaforschung
in Österreich, Heinrich Schneider.
Seinen 80. Geburtstag im Sommer 2009 durften wir im Herbst mit einem kleinen „Kaminabend“ im
Rahmen des Instituts für europäische Integrationsforschung an der Österreichischen Akademie
der Wissenschaften mit feiern, und eine seiner jüngsten Arbeiten soll nun auf diesem Wege
einer etwas breiteren Öffentlichkeit zugänglich gemacht werden. Die Leserschaft wird in diesem
Beitrag einen breit gespannten Bogen von prinzipiellen wie auch kon-kreten historischen Anmerkungen
sowie ein Panoptikum von wichtigen Einsichten und Erin-nerungen finden.
Dabei präsentiert das Papier Ausführungen zu folgenden Punkten:
a) der anfänglichen Verwendung und zum anfänglichen Verständnis von Integration;
b) dem deutschen Verständnis von Integrationsverantwortung;
c) den Karlsruher und Brünner Verfassungsgerichtsurteilen zum Lissabon-Vertrag;
d) der Dynamik und den Wirkkräften des Sinnwandels von Integrationskonzepten;
e) den Einigungsmotiven und politischen Weltbildern als Hintergrundfaktoren;
f) und dem Konzept des Superstaates.
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WP 02/2010 [pdf]
Dimiter Toshkov
WP 01/2010
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This paper presents a literature review of all quantitative (statistical) studies of
compliance with EU law. The paper introduces and makes use of a new online database which
presents a detailed and comprehensive overview and classification of the existing quantitative
research on transposition and implementation of EU directives in the member states. The study
discusses and compares the different conceptualizations and operationalizations of compliance
used, the list and specifications of the explanatory variables included in the models, the
hypotheses proposed, and, most importantly, the findings of the literature. While the academic
field has made progress in terms of assessing the scale and dimensions of the transposition
failures in the EU, the causal inferences advanced in the existing literature are often weakly
supported and sometimes contradictory when all studies are considered. The literature review
suggests that only causal relationships that are specific for a certain time period, policy
area, country, or type of legislation can be supported by empirical data, which means that
broad generalizations about compliance in the EU might be impossible to uncover. The paper
also suggests that decomposing the implementation process into its component stages, incorporating
more rigorously the interactions between the Commission and the member states, and paying
closer attention to the multilevel structure of the data in the statistical models can benefit
future research on compliance in the EU.
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WP 01/2010 [pdf]
Working Papers 2009
Patrick Müller
Nicole Alecu de Flers
WP 05/2009
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Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in applying the Europeanization concept
to the study of foreign policy. Discussing how foreign policy Europeanization relates to
Europeanization research in other areas of EU governance as well as to traditional approaches
from the International Relations discipline, we examine the added value of studying foreign
policy through the lens of Europeanization. As there is by now a considerable diversity of
explanations for EU-induced changes of the national foreign policies of EU Member States,
we propose important conceptual refinements, providing a clear distinction between the dimensions
of Europeanization, their respective outcomes and particularly the mechanisms that drive
Europeanization in these different dimensions. Overall, this working paper illustrates that
Europeanization research addresses important shortcomings of International Relations approaches
dominant in the field of European foreign policy analysis. By focusing on the interplay of “top-down“ and “bottom-up“ dynamics
between the EU and national levels, which have been previously considered as isolated phenomena,
the Europeanization concept contributes to a better understanding of the complex nature of
European foreign policy-making.
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WP 05/2009 [pdf]
Zdenek Kudrna
WP 04/2009
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This paper reviews the process of regulatory integration in the financial markets of
the European Union. It shows that the regulatory framework for the single market in financial
services has progressed in stages reflecting the evolution of EU policy-modes; from market
opening to attempts at harmonization, to reliance on mutual recognition. The slow progress
induced the EU to innovate its decision-making processes by introducing the Lamfalussy procedure
in 2001. The new procedure accelerated the adoption of new regulations and is being adapted
to ensure consistent enforcement across all EU jurisdictions. The next round of challenges
to regulatory integration will stem from weak crisis management mechanisms revealed by the
current crisis.
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WP 04/2009 [pdf]
Gerda Falkner
WP 03/2009
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This paper summarizes the state-of-the-art on European social policy integration. It
summarises the controversy over the ‘social dimension of European integration’,
which has been ongoing ever since the founding fathers of European integration in 1957 agreed
that the economies should be integrated basically without social regulation to counterbalance
liberalisation effects. It presents the historical development of EU social policy as well
as criteria for evaluating the state of “social Europe” and finally discusses
how the EU is impacting on different types of welfare states. The argument is that the EU
contributes to framework conditions that promote more ‘bounded varieties of welfare’ in
Europe. In other words, it is held that there will be a more restricted variety, oscillating
within limits that are directly or indirectly imposed or reinforced by European integration.
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WP 03/2009 [pdf]
Sandra Kröger
WP 02/2009
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This contribution analyses recent CAP reform, the so-called Health Check, and evaluates
the explanatory power of the theories usually applied to CAP change or the lack thereof.
The paper starts out by giving a brief account over the founding ideas and instruments of
CAP before it addresses recent reforms, the Fischler reform of 2003 and the so-called Health
Check of 2008, in detail. Doing so, it is shown that member states resistance against a stronger
marketisation of CAP persists while the discoursive trend towards rural development is not
financially supported by member states. Three sets of theories commonly used in political
science CAP analysis – ideas, interests and institutions – are identified and
explored with regard to their explanatory power for the latest reform. The contribution concludes
by arguing that there is no single factor driving CAP reform but that a triangle of international
trade negotiations, national and sectoral preferences as well as dominating paradigms in
public (and elite) discourses must be taken into consideration when seeking to explain the
direction and the occurrence of CAP change.
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WP 02/2009 [pdf]
Florian Trauner
WP 01/2009
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This paper takes stock of academic literature and official sources on post-accession
compliance in Bulgaria and Romania, the only new member states where the Commission has preserved
the right to monitor key reforms beyond accession. The data used in the analysis suggests
that the formal compliance with EU law has not decreased since their accession, quite the
contrary. Bulgaria and Romania have performed well with regard to the transposition of EU
law, yet signs of shortcomings appear at the enforcement level, most likely even on a greater
scale than in other CEECs. Moreover, it is argued that in the first two years of membership
the EU’s extended conditionality did not yield the same results in Bulgaria and Romania.
While Romania managed to convince the Commission of its good will and determination to meet
the benchmarks set by the EU, Bulgaria failed to do so and faced conditionality sanctions.
The analysis concludes by presenting some directions for further research.
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WP 01/2009 [pdf]
Working Papers 2008
Gerda Falkner (ed.)
WP 03/2008
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This paper presents a collaborative project by a team of members of the Institute for
European Integration Research at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. It compares five EU policy
areas in the following dimensions: common objectives on supranational level, EU competences
in the field, available policy instruments, decision-making procedures and institutional
developments, and finally the importance of the Lisbon Treaty's coming into force (or, alternatively,
its failure). One insight from the comparative approach is that the Lisbon Treaty outshines
previous EU reforms in terms of introducing new (explicit) objectives, improved policy instruments,
new (explicit) competences and room for decisions without unanimity requirement. The final
chapters offer a cross-sectoral discussion of reform potentials and their practical limitations,
based on tables with meta-level overviews. The policies discussed in detail cover energy,
social, foreign, security & defence as well as justice & home affairs.
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WP 03/2008 [pdf]
Andreas J. Obermaier
WP 02/2008
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Legal and political science scholars omit an important variable in explaining compliance
with ECJ rulings: the fine-tuning in the follow-up cases. This paper shows with the Kohll/Decker
social policy jurisprudence that, first, the Court applied the principles of free movement
of services and goods to the Luxembourg health care system in the initial rulings in this
series of cases and thereby challenged the institutional configuration of national welfare
states. Step by step the ECJ extended the legal principles to other Member States and to
similar cases. At the same time, however, the Court exercised self-restraint by narrowing
the principles and by thus limiting the impact of its decisions largely to the less costly
ambulatory sector. This fine-tuning of the jurisprudence influenced implementation processes
and ultimately facilitated Member State compliance.
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WP 02/2008 [pdf]
Reinhard Slepcevic
WP 01/2008
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Vor kurzem wurde ein neuer Ansatz zur Stärkung demokratischen Regierens jenseits
des Nationalstaats durch gerichtliche Rechtsdurchsetzung vorgestellt. Ihm zufolge ist die
gerichtliche Durchsetzung internationalen Rechts durch private Akteure eine legitime Form
demokratischer Partizipation, wodurch unter bestimmten Bedingungen demokratisches Regieren
gestärkt wird. In diesem Beitrag teste ich diese Bedingungen im Kontext der Europäischen
Union. Grundlage dafür sind vier Fallstudien über die gerichtliche Rechtsdurchsetzung
der Natura 2000 Richtlinien in Deutschland, Frankreich und den Niederlanden. Ich zeige, dass
die identifizierten Bedingungen nicht hinreichend sind, da zwei unabhängige Variablen – die
Interpretation nationaler Gerichte und die Reaktion der zuständigen Behörden auf
Klagen – nicht beachtet wurden.
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