Elizabeth Bomberg

European Union Decision Making: The Role of Sub-National Authorities

This article assesses how and to what extent sub-national authorities (SNAs) are represented in EU decision making. In particular, we compare the European goals and strategies of British sub-national authorities with those of their counterparts in Germany. Our central argument is that SNAs starting from very different positions face many of the same challenges and problems, even if their domestic constitutional positions remain the most important determinant of their influence at the EU level. Influence in EU decision making derives largely from effective coalition building, both with other like-minded actors but also, inevitably in the case of sub-national authorities, with central governments. Our case study highlights the enormous diversity of relationships between central governments and ‘their’ SNAs across the Union. It thus encourages scepticism about the feasibility of a ‘Europe of the Regions’.

The Internal Market

It is impossible to imagine the European Union without the internal market. The quest for a ‘common market’ was the prime rationale for the creation of the European Economic Community (EEC) in the first place. Thirty years later, the launch of the ‘1992 project’ marked a crucial turning point in EU decision-making. In subsequent years, the internal market — guaranteeing, in principle, the free movement of all goods, services, investment and people within the EU — accounted for as much as 70 per cent of all EU legislation. New policies for the environment, research, regional development and social policy were constructed to ‘flank’ the internal market, or to enhance or soften its impact.

Making Sense of EU Decision-Making

Why study decision-making in the European Union (EU)? A deceptively simple answer is: because a large share of public policy affecting 370 million European citizens (and many beyond the EU’s borders) is now decided at this level of governance. The accuracy of Jacques Delors’ famous prediction that 80 per cent of all economic and social legislation would be decided at the EU level by the late 1990s remains disputed.1 What is clear is that trying to measure how much legislation is decided at different levels of government in Europe is both pointless and beside the point. What makes the EU novel, interesting and worthy of close study is ‘its unique combination of national and supranational rules and institutions’2 (Begg 1996: 527).

The German greens and the European community: Dilemmas of a movement‐party

Focusing on the years 1979–89, this contribution examines the Europapolitik (policies and politics towards Europe) of the German Green party. It argues that as a ‘movement‐party’ ‐ part social movement, part political party ‐ the German Greens have faced peculiar challenges and opportunities in the European Community. In particular, their European policy has been defined by a conflict between the demands of their grassroots supporters and the imperatives of traditional party politics. By analysing the Greens’ alternative goals and strategies in Europe, this study demonstrates the contradictions inherent in the Greens’ Europapolitik. It concludes by applying the lessons from the Greens’ 1979–89 experience to the current Green group in the European Parliament.

The Common Foreign and Security Policy

To non-specialists, the European Community and European Union are interchangeable terms for the same organisation. To the serious student of decision-making, they are entirely different animals. The EC is a system for legislating according to the ‘Community method’ of decision-making (Devuyst 1999), which carefully weights Member States and EU institutions. In contrast, the EU is a symbolic construct, created by the Maastricht Treaty, which itself made the EC ‘just one pillar of a grander edifice called the European Union’.1 Two separate ‘pillars’ created for justice and home affairs policies (pillar III) and the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP, pillar II) produce ‘legislation’ relatively rarely. Decision-making within both is effectively intergovernmental and almost always requires unanimity.

The Common Agricultural Policy

The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) seeks to provide an internal market and common prices for agricultural products. It is distinctive amongst EU policies in its complexity, conflicting objectives and status as a ‘cornerstone’ of the EU. The CAP accounts for large shares of both EU decision-making and spending: about half of the Community’s budget, down from a staggering 87 per cent in 1970. Yet agriculture now accounts for only about 2.5 per cent of the Union’s gross domestic product (GDP).1 The CAP is blatantly regressive: it results in food prices that are about 8 per cent higher than in the United States (USA), with the burden falling most heavily on the poorest consumers. Roughly 80 per cent of the CAP’s benefits traditionally have accrued to 20 per cent of the EU’s (richest) farmers. Why such an elaborate, tortured and controversial policy for such a relatively marginal sector of the EU’s economy? There is no simple answer to this question, although this chapter, more than any other in this book, tries to simplify much that is very, very complicated (see Table 5.1).

External Trade Policy

Civilian superpower? Economic giant? Political pygmy? Much controversy surrounds the question of how the European Union should be characterised as an international actor (see Peterson and Sjursen 1998a). There is no question that the EU is a major trading power.1 The Union accounts for about 40 per cent of all global trade. More than half of all EU trade is internal ‘trade’ within the internal market, but the Union is the single largest trading bloc in the world. For Sir Leon Brittan (1996: 20), the Trade Commissioner for most of the 1990s, trade policy ‘has been perhaps the finest advertisement for the pooling of national sovereignty since the European Community came into existence’.

Research and Technology Policy

Before the 1980s, EU activities designed to promote research and technological development (RTD)1 were pretty small beer. By the mid-1990s, funding for research was the third largest item of policy expenditure in the EU’s budget. Moreover, the Union had become the most important source of policy affecting a range of high-growth, technology-intensive European industries. It had entered the highly politicised realm of broadcasting and ‘audio-visual policy’, where common interests were illusive even as technological advance made national borders increasingly meaningless. The EU became the horse that Europe rode in the race to create the vaguely explicated ‘information society’.

Institutions, Rules, Norms

As we have seen, there is plenty of theory to help us understand EU decision-making.1 Any theory of political action must confront basic questions, such as: Are the effects we wish to explain the products of actors displaying their agency, making unconstrained choices; [or] are these effects the products of an unfolding logic of a structure (or set of structures) over which agents (individual or collective) have no control?’ (Hay 1995: 189; see also Wendt 1987)2