ABSTRACT
The very fact that EU policy-making is a collective exercise involving large numbers of participants, often in intermittent and unpredictable ‘relationships’, is likely to reinforce the processes by which national autonomy is being eroded, as well as the capacity for consistent EU-level political leadership. The likelihood of any one government or any one national system of policy actors (e.g. governments and interest groups combined) imposing their will on the rest is low. National governments know this. We can, therefore, expect to see the emergence of two apparently contradictory trends. First, the need to construct complex transnational coalitions of actors will force all actors to become less focused on the nation states as the ‘venue’ for policy-making. Just as many large firms have long since abandoned the notion of the nation state, so will other policy actors; they will seek to create and participate in a multi-layered system of transnational coalitions. Second, the ‘politics of uncertainty’ will lead national governments and national interest groups to try to coordinate their Euro-strategies (e.g. see DTI 1993; 1994). In that sense, Euro-policy-making may bring them closer together. (For a more detailed discussion of this paradox, see Mazey and Richardson in this volume.)
One reason for the difficulty in maintaining stable national coalitions is that membership of the EU presents all policy actors with a choice of venue for the resolution of policy conflicts. As Baumgartner and Jones argue, political actors are capable of strategic action by employing a dual strategy of controlling the prevailing image of the policy problem and also seeking out the most favourable venue for the consideration of issues (Baumgartner and Jones 1991:1046). In this sense, the EU policy process represents a different order of multiple access points for policy actors when compared with many of the policy systems of the member states. Many of them, such as Britain and France, have traditionally operated rather centralised policy-making systems with, consequently, relatively few national ‘venues’ for exercising influence. The EU policy process is more akin to the US and German systems, where interests have a wide range of venues to engage in the policy process. Unified and centralised policy systems may encourage cohesion in policy communities in part because all of the players know that there are relatively few options for exercising influence elsewhere: this is not the case within the EU, where several ‘venues’ are available to actors who have lost out in any one of them. The tendency of the EU policy process to pass through periods of stability and periods of dramatic institutional changein the episodic fashion suggested earlier-will also lead to instability in actor relationships. As Baumgartner and Jones suggest, changes in institutional structures (a feature of the EU) can also often lead to dramatic and long-lasting changes in policy outcomes (Baumgartner and Jones 1993:12).
