ABSTRACT
Introduction This chapter provides an overall perspective on the EU policy making process as background to the evaluation of EU transport policy. ‘Policy-making’ is not normally a phrase used to describe the functioning of international agreements, however; it implies a polity or political system of the sort which operates in a domestic political environment. Yet the term is appropriate here because, along a spectrum between national political systems and international organisations, the EU is closer to the former than to the latter. It shares many similarities with institutions, practices and problems in national policy settings (Hix, 1995, 1999) and, accordingly, we are able to consider EU policy processes from the vantage point of debates within the political science and policy analysis literature which assume the state as their focal point. That said, however, we also need to recognise that the EU system is rather distinctive due to the ‘international’ aspects of its operations and the institutional bargains which have shaped its development. Factors such as the incomplete nature of the political system, the multilevel nature of policy making (and of influencing policy) and the relatively high propensity towards regulation as a mode of governance render the EU unique (Laffan, 1998) and we need to take these distinctive characteristics into account. As a result the paper also draws upon concepts and approaches which have been developed within the academic community specifically to explain how the EU works.The chapter has four sections. The first reviews the historical evolution and institutional development of the EU, providing a context to the rest of this chapter and the book. The second elaborates upon some of the distinctive features of the EU considers how the EU has been analysed over the last fifty years. The third section looks at the institutional interactions within the EU both at the European level and between the EU and the national (and other) levels. The fourth section looks at how we can
understand policy change within the EU. In the conclusion we consider how the EU policy process can be understood in terms of some of the principal categories of policy making. The paper draws upon a range of sectoral examples with particular attention given to the energy and transport sectors and their interaction with market liberalisation, environmental protection and regional development policies.
