Abstract
Explaining the European Union — what it does, how it does it and with what effect — is one of the most daunting challenges facing political science as a discipline. Clearly, there are important differences between being an ordinary nation-state and an EU Member State. The Union is obviously a highly ‘differentiated polity’ (Rhodes 1997: 7). Eastern enlargement and EMU are likely to transform EU decision-making. Otherwise, the EU resists simple, uncontroversial generalisations.
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Notes
See interview with Volker Stoltz in European Voice, 20–26 February 1997. This assertion probably would come as no surprise to Page (1997: 16), who notes Ezra Suleiman’s description of the role of the Grands Corps in France’s domestic administration as ‘part of a network within and beyond the administration, which enables them to arbitrate conflicts and co-ordinate policies’. Page (1997: 55) also suggests that France appears to defend its ‘national flags’ in the Commission’s upper administration more effectively than any other Member State.
Take, for example, Moravcsik’s claim (1995: 622) that ‘Where the preferences of supranational authorities are more stable than those of governments … the former may be able to act incrementally to increase their power.’
Consider the specific examples Bulmer (1998: 367) uses to illustrate this argument: ‘rolling medium-term policy programmes, such as the Framework programmes … environmental action programmes and others in areas such as social affairs or equal opportunities, or the Lomé convention’. Arguably, all either do touch the highest political levels of decision-making, or are essentially declaratory, and thus do not fundamentally change the way the EU works, even if some (such as EAPs) may produce a kind of ‘soft law’.
Interview, EU Committee of the American Chamber of Commerce of Belgium, Brussels, 15 September 1994 (quoted in Peterson 1997: 18).
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© 1999 John Peterson and Elizabeth Bomberg
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Peterson, J., Bomberg, E. (1999). Conclusion. In: Decision-Making in the European Union. The European Union Series. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27507-6_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27507-6_11
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