ABSTRACT

One of the main attributes of the nation state is the ability to make ‘authoritative allocations’ for society. In practice this means an ability to formulate and implement public policy programmes governing the operation of society. Whether the European Union (EU) can be considered a fully fledged state is debatable. For example, Hix, drawing on Almond’s (1956) and Easton’s (1957) characterisations of political systems, concludes that the EU is certainly a political system in that it exhibits most of the characteristics that those writers attribute to political systems. However, he concludes that it is not a state as it lacks a monopoly on the legitimate use of coercion that characterises a state (Hix 2005: 4). Even so, it is beyond dispute that the EU has acquired for itself at least the policy-making attributes of a modern state across an increasingly wide range of policy sectors. Therre is now a huge corpus of EU law affecting a wide range of policy sectors and, as Hix notes, the EU policy process remains very productive in that ‘on average more than 100 pieces of legislation pass through the EU institutions every year – more than most other democracies’ (Hix 2005: 4). Moreover, the EU does have a degree of ‘coercive’ power to enforce policy decisions due to the supremacy of EU law over national law. Also, the EU has a degree of steering capacity, via less coercive governance mechanisms, which means that ‘power’ can be exercised in the sense of getting other actors to change their behaviour. Thus, perhaps we need to have a more sophisticated and subtle notion of EU power, not based on old-fashioned coercion resting on the monopoly of force. (Indeed, how much of the power of the modern nation state over its citizens really rests on coercive force?)

Much of the criticism of the EU over the past decade (and part of the basis of the growing Euroscepticism) has been centred upon the alleged ‘excessive’ policy-making role of the EU in general and of the Commission in particular. The argument now is that the EU has become a ‘nanny’ state, over-regulating the economic and social life of member states. Increasing Euroscepticism appears to be causing some of the key stakeholders, particularly the member states, to apply the brakes to the seemingly inexorable extension of the EU’s policy-making competence. As Radaelli (1999) suggests, things began to change in the 1990s. Not just the quantity of EU legislation has been subject to challenge, but also its quality and the processes by which it is made. As he notes, the Amsterdam Treaty contains an entire title on the quality of EU legislation. Thus, ‘good legislation requires consultation, regulatory impact assessment, and systematic evaluation of the results achieved by European public policies. But it also requires transparency’ (Radaelli 1999: 5). These ‘process issues’ were equally prominent in the Convention and are in part addressed in the 2004 Constitution (see Laffan and Mazey in this

volume). In practice, the erosion of national sovereignty (which clearly has taken place, over time) means the erosion of the power of the member states exclusively to decide much of their public policy via domestic policy-making processes and institutions. Whilst retaining the traditional coercive powers of the state, such as going to war, states have in practice ceded many areas of hitherto domestic policy-making to the EU, albeit retaining a powerful role at the new transnational level at which these policies are now made. The EU level is now the level at which a significant proportion of what used to be regarded as purely domestic policy-making takes place. Hix suggests that the EU sets over 80 per cent of the rules governing the exchange of goods, services and capital in the member states’ markets (Hix 2005: 4), although Moravcsik is more doubtful, citing one study which estimated that the actual percentage of EU-based legislation is probably between 10 and 20 per cent of national rule-making (Moravcsik 2005: 17). Moravcsik also argues that many policy areas are still untouched by direct EU policy-making, such as social welfare, health care, pensions, education, defence, active cultural policy, and most law and order (Moravcsik 2005: 17). However, other authors see a stronger European influence (albeit sometimes indirect) in at least some of these policy areas. For example, Greer’s study of neofunctionalism in EU health policy concludes that ‘once the European Court of Justice had decided that health systems are economic activities like any others, and therefore subject to internal market legislation, the conditions under which health systems gain and use resources changed dramatically, regardless of formal state protection or the existence of ECJ principles that limit the ability of EU law to wholly upset health systems’ (Greer 2006). Whatever the true figure for the amount of legislation that now emanates from the EU, it seems reasonable to assume that the direction of change is steady. For many policy areas, the locus of decision-making – and therefore power – has already shifted and it seems likely that others will gradually follow this pattern, albeit along different paths. Also, as Stone Sweet argues, there appear to be no examples of rollback (Stone Sweet 2004: 236). A more complex structure of policy-making has developed at the EU level, encompassing a much wider range of public and private policy actors. All of these actors – especially national governments – are having to adjust to the reality of this situation. They have all ‘lost’ some power in a common pooling of policymaking sovereignty. For those European nations who are members of the EU (and for many who are not), at least two policy-making systems now cohabit – domestic and EU policy systems. As Laffan et al. suggest, the defining characteristic of the Union is the enmeshing of the national and the European, or the embedding of the national in the European (Laffan et al. 2000: 74-8). This has led to what they term a system of ‘international governance’, with the EU, as an arena of public policy, presenting ‘a challenge to national political systems because they are confronted with the need to adapt to a normative and strategic environment that escapes total control’ (Laffan et al. 2000: 84-7).