ABSTRACT
Standard portrayals of modern government tend to focus on the national and sub-national levels of government. The fact that modern governments for quite a long time have been involved in a multitude of international bodies across most policy areas does not seem to have changed this perspective profoundly. In this article, however, I argue that European governments, or, more correctly, parts of national governments, over the last couple of decades have to some extent become parts of a kind of European government as well. This is due to quite particular institutional developments at both the European and the national level. At the European level, it is first and foremost the enhanced autonomy and
consolidation of the European Commission which makes the difference: for the first time in the history of international organisations we can speak of a multi-purpose supranational executive with its own political leadership that is able to act relatively independently from national governments and councils of ministers. Being in charge of EU policy formulation as well as implementation, the Commission needs stable partners at the national level for both purposes. Arguably, those partners might be found among national
(regulatory) agencies that during the same period of time have been created at arm’s length from ministerial departments. Thus, the peculiar functional division of labour between the Commission and the Council of Ministers (Union Council) triggers centrifugal forces at the very heart of national governments. Such forces cannot be expected to emanate from classic international organisations in which all threads tend to be collected in councils of ministers. In the latter case national regulatory authorities will normally be held accountable to a particular ministry. In the EU case, on the other hand, a kind of dual loyalty, or ‘double-hattedness’, might be imposed on national agencies in the sense that they have to relate to both national ministries and the Commission. The next section discusses what most students of government hold to
be a key feature of development over the last couple of decades: ‘agencification’ and fragmentation of national governments. Interestingly, when dealing with the problems such a development might cause for democratic control and agency accountability, the focus tends to be on the relationships between agencies and various national stakeholders. Has a ‘methodological nationalism’ hindered us from seeing the emerging executive at the level above and the re-coupling of nationally decoupled agencies into multilevel and transnational networks of regulatory bodies? The following two sections try to show how the development of the EU takes quite another direction than intergovernmental cooperation and thus comes to challenge governments in a peculiar way. I draw on several case studies to illuminate how national agencies become parts of two administrations, a national as well as a Union administration. Finally, before concluding, the article deals with motors of change and the various attempts at explaining the major changes over the last couple of decades.
