ABSTRACT
Much of the recent literature on decision-making within the EU has polarised between those who draw on international relations approaches and depict EU policy as predominantly the result of intergovernmental negotiation, and those who build on neo-functionalist interpretations highlighting the integrationist dynamic within the EU. In the second camp are analysts who depict the EU variously as a policy-making or regulatory state, where a tissue of policy networks and communities helps determine policy outcomes, and where nation states acquiesce or connive at a transfer of decision-making power from the more politicised and constrained national arena to the largely technocratic environment which characterises much EU decision-making (Majone 1996). Richardson provides a particularly striking critique of the limitations of intergovernmentalist interpretations in explaining how much policy now gets made in the EU:
Put simply, the traditional ‘clients’ of national governments have become transnationally promiscuous in their relationships. Second, the ‘politics of expertise’ has become especially important in situations of loose networks and high uncertainty. This also weakens national sovereignty because of the increasingly cross-national nature of expertise and the ability of other EU policy actors-particularly the Commission-to choose which body of expertise to mobilise at any one time. Hence our suggestion that the concept of epistemic communities is especially useful at the EU level in understanding how policy problems emerge and come to be ‘framed’ for official policy-makers.
