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Chapter 9 focuses on a new quality of linkages between the European and the national levels of governance in the area of European employment policy where ‘soft’ techniques of integration such as best practice procedures and benchmarking and the employment programmes of the European Social Funds prevail. However, so the argument goes, ‘soft’ forms of governance are much more than symbolic politics and may cause ‘hard’ effects. European employment policy is an instructive case demonstrating not only the structural change of European policy but also the (re-)structuring of the nation state by European integration. Thus, notable shifts in European employment policy are identified in three dimensions: (a) a reduced range of politics, (b) the dominance of criteria of economic rationality, and (c) a new demarcation between the public and the private sphere. Eventually, the division of labour between European and national governance will be altered by the open method of coordination in European employment policy as this ‘soft’ governance mechanism effectively blurs the boundaries between EU and member state responsibilities.

This chapter argues that the risk of terrorist attacks by transnational groups has been systematically invoked by EU bodies to justify the launch (or expansion) of a broad set of risk-management programmes and projects that involve a combination of inclusive and exclusionary practices. To begin with, those actors seen as vulnerable to, but not yet fully corrupted by, the anti-liberal ideas promoted by terrorist organizations are to be supported, monitored, and guided by the EU in an attempt to transform them into self-disciplined, ‘responsible’ liberal actors who are worthy of inclusion in liberal relations of community. Thus, in the contemporary security environment, the EU has sought to enhance its ability to construct ‘good’ (liberal) actors, both in Europe and abroad, and in so doing also to expand the broader security community of liberal-democratic values. Those inclusive practices are accompanied by attempts at enhancing the collective ability of members of the Union to identify and exclude from their territory — or at least contain and place beyond the realm of normal politics and liberal socio-economic activities — individuals and groups with alleged links to international terrorism.

This concluding chapter addresses the main issues raised in the Introduction and presents the general findings that emerge from the country studies. It has three main aims. First, it puts forward three arguments on the basis of the national investigations of policy co-ordination at the European level, and comparisons of permanent representations: the first argument is that that all the member states have responded to the co-ordination need that arises from EU policy-making and most aspire to a careful crafting of policy, but that the nature of their response varies according to the prevailing national attitude to European integration, features of the national political and administrative opportunity structures, policy style, and available resources; the second argument is that, although there are some similarities between national arrangements with respect to some aspects of organization and core functions, there are also several very substantial differences—neither the ‘convergence hypothesis’ nor the ‘continuing divergence hypothesis’ outlined in the Introduction is confirmed by the case studies, but there is evidence that many of the factors identified by each are at work; the third argument is related to effectiveness—each set of national arrangements has its own particular strengths and weaknesses, but one common factor affecting performance is the efficiency of domestic co-ordination procedures. The second aim of the Conclusion is to consider the wider implications of the findings both for the functioning of the European Union as a system and for theorizing about the EU; with respect to the former, national arrangements in Brussels do little to overcome the problem of segmentation that characterizes the EU, but concerning the latter, the case studies suggest that the intergovernmentalist image is at odds with how national policy preferences are actually formed and the nature of the role played by the permanent representations; the alternative image approach outlined above, and described in the Introduction, offers a better guide on both counts. The third and final aim of the chapter is to compare national co-ordination practices at the domestic level with those found at the European level; the contention put forward is that the domestic co-ordination of EU policy is more effective than processes at the European level.

The relationship between the European Commission and the various lobbying groups in Brussels is explored, and it is argued that there is now a ‘mature’ institutionalized policy-making style governing interactions between the Commission and interest groups. The formal and informal rules by which the Commission receives and seeks to organize lobbyist’s views, and interest groups influence the Commission’s development of legislative proposals are catalogued. It is found that there has been a steady evolution of some formal, but more often informal, rules and procedures for lobbying organizations. These include: willingness to participate in early discussions; presenting rational/technical arguments based on reliable data; viewing European policy as an opportunity, not a threat; formulating European, not national or particularistic, solutions; understanding the problems and perspectives of other stakeholders in the process; and investing in the entire policy-making process. This development of a stable system of interest group representation for the European Union (EU), sited in Brussels, impinges heavily not only on policy processes and outcomes but also on how democracy in the EU will be conceived and debated.

An analysis is made of the creation of new European Union (EU) spaces for cooperation in policing and immigration policies. The Treaty of Rome was silent on both topics, and before the Maastricht Treaty on European Union (TEU), European Community (EC) states had begun to coordinate their responses to specific problems – such as terrorism, drugs, and asylum seekers – usually on a bilateral basis, with multilateral forms of cooperation fragmented, ad hoc, and outside EC structures. The chapter has three main sections, the first of which briefly describes the institutional landscape in policing and migration in Europe before the TEU. Section 2 assesses the major internal and external changes – the Single Market and the collapse of the Iron Curtain, respectively – that provoked the move toward institutionalizing police and migration cooperation at the EU level; it devotes particular attention to the domestic crisis in Germany resulting from massive migrations from the east, and the policy entrepreneurship of Germany’s Chancellor Helmut Kohl. Section 3 analyses how the Third Pillar of the TEU, that on Justice and Home Affairs (in which policing and immigration policies were combined) borrowed from existing institutions – most notably the Second Pillar (the Common Foreign and Security Policy); the Amsterdam Treaty (1996) then partially separated policing and migration again – but with a completely different institutional structure within the European Union.

An examination is made of the impact of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) on the institutional evolution of European Union sex equality policy, following the provision in the Treaty of Rome (Art. 119 EEC, now Art. 141) that men and women would receive equal pay for equal work – a provision aimed at protecting businesses from unfair competition. This same provision now bestows a positive right on individuals throughout the Member States, and is a judicially enforceable right that remains the backbone of an ever-expanding European social-justice policy. Over time, strategic action on the part of litigants and their lawyers and the ECJ’s judicial rule-making capacity has constructed a supranational space in which women can not only demand the right to equal pay but can also receive protection as pregnant workers. This dynamic process is the focus of the analysis presented, and involves an examination of three basic mechanisms of institutional evolution: the process by which self-interested private litigants and their lawyers are able to activate the European Union (EU) legal system through the Art. 177 (now Art. 234) procedure (which allows national individuals to invoke EU law before national courts); the ECJ’s authoritative interpretation of Art. 119 (focusing on how it became directly effective in national legal systems); and the feedback effects of this judicial rule-making in terms of how the litigation environment has been changed, and the EU and national-level policy consequence. In particular, the latter are traced through the development of EU pregnancy and maternity rights.

An examination is made of how tensions that develop between supranational and national governance structures are resolved, given the institutionalization taking place at the European level. The focus is on two national policy domains – state aids and regional development – and the author explains how, since the mid-1980s, European Union (EU) officials have succeeded in inducing their French counterparts to alter legislation and administrative practices once assumed to be fundamentally immune to external influence – a process that is increasingly referred to as the ‘Europeanization of the nation state’. The view taken is that Europeanization took place in a series of ‘rounds’ that have followed a common sequence: disagreement about the nature and scope of EU rules in national regimes; open contestation between supranational and national officials; the fixing of a new or clarified rule on the part of EU officials; and, finally, the grudging acceptance of the rule by the French. After each round, new patterns of French resistance emerged, but the rules of the game governing these interactions are fixed by the results of previous rounds, and come to be more or less taken for granted by actors at both levels; it is argued that the overall process tends to favour the expansion and diffusion of EU modes of governance, and the weakening of specifically national modes. The chapter is divided into three main sections: the first provides a summary overview of the development of EU competition policy and its intersections with state aids and regional policy; the second focuses on state aids in two sectors (French regional and industrial policy), which are analysed against the backdrop of the development of European competition law; and the third part discusses conflicts over the meaning of European rules in relation to the process of ‘endogenous’ institutional change.

Takes up the relationship between the US and regional multilateral organizations in Europe, in particular, NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization), and the European Union (specifically the common European security and defence policy, or ESDP). It is suggested that US relations with Europe are an indicator of the US commitment to multilateralism more generally, and argued that the US approach to NATO has been driven by a combination of international structural factors (the distribution of capabilities) and the key domestic factor of national character (the liberal identity of the US). These very same factors hold important consequences for NATO because the US is the decisive actor in NATO, which, as a political entity, reflects the multilateralism that has its foundations in US national character, but as a military instrument, reflects the dominant power of the US. The resulting tensions in NATO were finessed more easily during the cold war, in the face of a common enemy, but are more significant in the current unipolar system, which exaggerates both the incentives for the US to act unilaterally and the frustration of European states who are less able to constrain the US yet unwilling to act independently. The author expects NATO to become less rather than more important to the US in the years ahead, and thus to matter less as a multilateral organization. The different sections of the chapter are: Isolationism as Multilateralism's ‘Other’?; Sources of America's Eurocentric Multilateralism; Systemic Change and American Behaviour: The Case of NATO; Consequences for Multilateral Organizations: The EU and the ESDP; and The Bush Administration and the European Allies.

One of the challenges of Europeanization as an innovative research agenda is the identification of mechanisms through which domestic public policy is Europeanized. In Chapter 2, Radaelli identified two types of mechanisms, vertical (these include European Commission (EC) directives, European Court of Justice (ECJ) decisions, and EC competition decisions) and horizontal (suggestion of best practice through European level policy forums). This chapter elaborates on these mechanisms by considering the case of media market regulation in the European Union (EU), arguing that Europeanization of this policy area can be understood by looking at the interplay between the two mechanisms. An examination is made of vertical mechanisms in the section ‘The Impact of ECJ Decisions on National Regulation’, and of horizontal mechanisms in the section ‘Vertical Europeanization via EC Merger Policy’; together these sections provide an overview of ECJ and competition decisions. The section on ‘The Commission and New Modes of Governance’ overviews how policy ideas travel through European-level forums; last, the ‘Conclusion’ looks at how Europeanization has driven the convergence of national media policies.

The focus of this chapter is on the institutionalization of a space for the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), and on efforts since the signing of the Maastricht Treaty on European Union (TEU) to link the CFSP with other European Union (EU) domains under a principle of coherence. In the light of unfavourable perceptions about institutional performance in the conduct of EU external relations, and the perceived need for change, two major questions are addressed: the kinds of institutional problems that have resulted from the TEU’s provisions on external relations; and the extent to which, and how, these problems have been resolved. The chapter first maps out the EU’s institutional space in the policy domains most directly concerned with external relations, and then shows how these mechanisms created new problems, and thus pressures for institutional change, once the TEU came into effect. These problems are defined primarily in terms of institutional gaps and contradictions across the EU’s external policy domains. Finally, the attempts of the EU to resolve these problems through two sets of institutional reforms, one informal and the other formal, are described.

Common wisdom has it that European disagreements over the American-led invasion of Iraq killed the prospects for a European defense and foreign policy—but the common wisdom is wrong. In recent years, Europeans have moved fairly steadily in the direction of a meaningful European Security and Defense Policy (ESDP). The member-states remain divided on many policy issues and a number of deep obstacles remain to a strong common policy. But few now question the idea that Europe should play a greater role on the world stage, and the past several years have seen modest but concrete steps toward that goal.

An examination is made of the emergence and institutionalization of a new policy domain for the European Community (EC): environmental protection – a domain that did not exist before the signing of the Single European Act (SEA) of 1985, when the Member States formally recognized the EC's legislative authority in the field, and the strengthening of these competences in 1992 by the Treaty of European Union and in 1997 by the Treaty of Amsterdam. Partly owing to lack of Treaty basis, and partly because of factors to be discussed in this chapter, the influence of the legal system on the development of the EC's policy has not been as pervasive as it has been for the main categories of law and policy established under the original Rome Treaty. The first section, ‘The Policy Domain’ provides a brief overview of the evolution of environmental protection as a supranational field of governance. The second focuses on the attempts of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) to manage the relationship between freedom of trade (free movement of goods) and the EC's environmental policies, showing that this case law served to legitimize the EC's competences in the field before the SEA. The third section assesses the Court's interactions with the EC legislator and the Member States from the perspective of delegation theory, examining both what happens when the ECJ acts as a trustee of the Treaty, and when it functions as an agent of the legislator, i.e. when it is asked to resolve disputes about the meaning of provisions contained in EC statutes; no evidence was found that the ECJ regularly defers to the interests of powerful Member States, rather, it has pursued the ‘Community's interest’, broadly conceived, even when engaging in routine statutory interpretation.

Concerns decision-making in the European Union (EU), given the ever-present threat of deadlock, and argues that a set of informal and more formal tactics, serving to facilitate rule-making, has evolved to deal with this problem. Three basic modes of overt and covert institutionalization are identified and discussed: overt and formal modes of rule-changing; overt change through informal strategies and patterns; and covert institutionalization through committing actors at an early stage, shaping policy behind closed doors, and re-labelling and restructuring a choice situation. The theoretical foundations of each of these are discussed, and each is illustrated by empirical examples of European policy-making, including various examples of initiatives that were initially blocked by the Council of Ministers, but eventually became EU law and policy. Finally, the question is raised as to the consequences of these different modes of institutionalization and the conditions under which these different paths of deepening European institutionalization do not normally occur.