ABSTRACT
The majority of European Union (EU) member states implement the majority of EU law on time (Tallberg 2002: 624). In the remaining cases, enforcement measures are necessary to make unwilling member states comply. Leaving aside cases involving ‘involuntary non-compliance’ due to inadequate capacity or genuine misunderstanding (Mastenbroek 2005: 1108), I will focus on cases where governments are ‘voluntarily reluctant’ to implement EU law. This reluctance is assumed to be the result of ‘misfit’ (Haverland 2000), meaning the expected political, economic and ideological costs which would result from the policy change needed in order to comply with EU agreements.2 When implementation comes up against strong domestic opposition (political costs) or requires far-reaching policy change (economic or ideological costs), a government will prefer to postpone implementation. Under which conditions will the European Commission (Commission) and the European Court of Justice (Court) succeed in making such an unwilling state comply? In order to understand why compliance rates differ so much between EU member states, it has been argued that we ‘need to bring domestic politics back in’ (Falkner et al. 2005: 329). This chapter will show that we also need to theorize domestic politics in order to explain the varying effectiveness of enforcement by the Commission and the Court. In the first section, a theoretical framework is elaborated, based on the assumption that unwilling states will only implement European law if the costs of non-implementation exceed those of implementation. It will be argued that an unwilling state will therefore only give in to supranational pressure if simultaneous pressure is exerted by domestic actors and the state is caught in an uncomfortable ‘pincer action’. In the second section, the implementation of European gender equality policies since the 1960s is investigated in the Netherlands, the Federal Republic of Germany and France. The implementation record in this field varies significantly between states and across time. In addition, the Commission and the Court have been more active in some cases than in others, and it is precisely these types of variation that require explanation. The concluding section will address the questions of which conditions are necessary for
supranational actors to be willing to coerce a non-compliant member state to comply and under which conditions they are able to do so effectively.
