Roads Lead Away from Rome

All Roads Lead Away From Rome A Liberal Theory of International Regimes by Mareike Kleine Dissertation zur Erlangung des Grades des Dr. phil. / Ph.D. eingereicht im September 2009 am Otto-Suhr-Institut für Politikwissenschaft Fachbereich für Politik- und Sozialwissenschaften Freie Universität Berlin Erstgutachter: Prof. Dr. Thomas Risse Zweitgutachter: Prof. Dr. Andrew Moravcsik Mentor im Rahmen der BTS: Prof. Dr. Robert O. Keohane Acknowledgement This dissertation would not have been possible without the extraordinary support of my three advisors: Thomas Risse, Andy Moravcsik, and Bob Keohane. I am especially grateful to Andy for his continuous encouragement and, most of all, for his friendship. Ich widme die Dissertation dem Angedenken meiner lieben Eltern. Princeton, September 2009 2 Table of Contents Graphs, Figures and Tables 4 Abbreviations 6 Theory Chapter 1 – Introduction 9 Chapter 2 – Liberal Regime Theory 23 Part I – The Informal Norm of Discretion in EC Decision-Making 1958-2001 Chapter 3 – Formal and Informal Practices 54 Chapter 4 – Agenda Setting 75 Chapter 5 – Voting 115 Chapter 6 – Implementation 158 Part II – Auxiliary Institutions in EC Decision-Making Chapter 7 – Moral Hazard and Auxiliary Institutions 185 Chapter 8 – The Evolution of the Council Presidency 200 Chapter 9 – The Presidency Bias 214 Chapter 10 – The Presidency as an Adjudicator 230 Conclusion Chapter 11 – Conclusion and Extension 265 Appendix Primary Sources 279 Bibliography 281 Curriculum Vitae 304 3 Graphs, Figures and Tables Graphs Graph 1: Commission’s reliance on governmental expertise 1963-1969………………………...… 90 Graph 2: Council legal acts 1958-2001…………………………………………………………...... 116 Graph 3: Consensus decision-making in the Council 1994-2001…………………………………... 127 Graph 4: Consensus decision-making by issue-area 1995-2001……………………………………. 128 Graph 5: Intergovernmental negotiations 1958-1969………………………………………………. 132 Graph 6: A- and B-Points in 1969……………………………………………………………........... 134 Graph 7: Intergovernmental negotiations 1970-1986………………………………………………. 137 Graph 8: Intergovernmental negotiations 1987-1993………………………………………………. 138 Graph 9: Intergovernmental negotiations 1994-2001………………………………………………. 140 Graph 10: Council legal output and intergovernmental negotiations 1958-2001…………………... 142 Graph 11: Delegation of implementation power in major EC laws 1959-1969…………………… 159 Graph 12: Executive discretion 1958-1969: the Commission vs. national administrations………… 161 Graph 13: Delegation of implementation power in major EC laws 1970-1986…………………….. 163 Graph 14: Executive discretion 1970-1986…………………………………………………………. 164 Graph 15: Delegation of implementation power in major EC laws 1987-1993…………………….. 166 Graph 16: Executive discretion 1987-1993…………………………………………………………. 168 Graph 17: Delegation of implementation power in major EC laws 1958-1993…………………….. 172 Graph 18: Executive discretion 1958-1993…………………………………………………………. 173 Figures Figure 1: Institutions as equilibria……………………………………………………………........... 18 Figure 2: Causal mechanism and structure of the study……………………………………………. 22 Figure 3: Political uncertainty……………………………………………………………................ 28 Figure 4: Variation in political uncertainty and the demand for discretion………………………… 44 Figure 5: Changes in the Parliamentary involvement in EC Decision-Making……………………. 57 Figure 6: The Community Method (1958) ………………………………………………………… 59 Figure 7: The Council substructure by 1962……………………………………………………….. 133 Figure 8: The Council substructure by 1993……………………………………………………….. 140 4 Tables Table 1: Liberal Regime Theory – the causal mechanism ………………………………………… 35 Table 2: Summary of hypotheses……………………………………………………………............ 47 Table 3: The dependent variable – formal and informal practices…………………………………. 65 Table 4: Hypotheses concerning issue-specific variation of informal practices…………………… 70 Table 5: Formal and informal practices in agenda setting………………………………………….. 74 Table 6a: Informal practices in agenda setting and confirmation of Liberal Regime Theory……… 86 Table 6b: Informal practices in agenda setting and confirmation of Liberal Regime Theory……… 103 Table 6c: Informal practices in agenda setting and confirmation of Liberal Regime Theory……… 109 Table 6d: Informal practices in agenda setting and confirmation of Liberal Regime Theory……… 112 Table 7: Formal and informal practices in voting…………………………………………………... 114 Table 8a: Informal practices in voting and confirmation of Liberal Regime Theory……………… 129 Table 8b: Informal practices in voting and confirmation of Liberal Regime Theory……………… 142 Table 8c: Informal practices in voting and confirmation of Liberal Regime Theory……………… 153 Table 8d: Informal practices in voting and confirmation of Liberal Regime Theory……………… 155 Table 9: Formal and informal practices in implementation………………………………………… 157 Table 10: Informal practices and confirmation of Liberal Regime Theory………………………… 174 Table 11: Informal practices in decision-making and confirmation of Liberal Regime Theory….... 177 Table 12: Hypotheses concerning auxiliary institutions……………………………………………. 196 Table 13: Results of the regression analysis………………………………………………………… 218 5 Abbreviations CAP Common Agricultural Policy CoG Chief of Government COREPER Committee of Permanent Representatives CP Council Presidency DG Directorate-General EC European Community ECJ European Court of Justice ECSC European Coal and Steel Community EEC European Economic Community EP European Parliament EU European Union Euratom European Atomic Energy Community GDP Gross Domestic Product IGC Intergovernmental Conference PSC Political and Security Committee QMV Qualified Majority Voting RoP Rules of Procedure SCA Special Committee on Agriculture SEA Single European Act TEC Treaty establishing the European Community WG Working Groups WTO World Trade Organization 6 – Theory – 7 8 CHAPTER 1 Introduction The Puzzle: A Mix of Formal Rules and Informal Practices1 Scholars and politicians alike agree that the European Union (EU) is the epitome of international cooperation and a triumph of institutionalism in international politics. Over the past fifty years, the member states increasingly pooled their sovereignty and delegated authority to the EU’s supranational institutions in order to implement and uphold cooperation among them. At every single stage in decision-making, formal rules on agenda setting, voting, and implementation provide for the possibility of imposing outcomes on reluctant governments. This depth of formalized cooperation in Europe today is unparalleled in modern international politics. Yet, at the EU’s very core lies a troubling puzzle: governmental behavior in everyday decision-making bears little resemblance to formal rules. Instead, informal practices abound as European governments regularly display behavior contrary to the behavior we might expect on the basis of formal rules. For instance, the “Treaty of Rome”, which founded the European Community (EC)2 in 1958, was acclaimed for endowing an independent, supranational Commission with the monopoly of initiative within the EC. Nowadays, however, the agenda is regularly predetermined by the heads of state convening within the European Council, an institution not provided for in the founding treaty. To give another example, the treaty 1 In line with the institutions-as-equilibria approach pursued in this study, this study employs the following terminology borrowed from Stephen Krasner and Avner Greif. Institutions, or regimes, are “explicit or implicit principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures around which actor’s expectations converge in a given area of international relations. Principles are beliefs of facts, causation and rectitude. Norms are standards of behavior defined in terms of rights and obligations. Rules are specific prescription or proscriptions of actions.” (Krasner 1982, 185). The focus in this study is primarily on norms and rules in decision-making. According to this approach, every institution in principle manifests itself in a set of observable regular patterns of behavior, often called strategy, which will be referred to as practices (see Greif 2006, 351). Practices, derived from formal or informal institutional elements, are the dependent variable in this study. 2 The EC succeeds the EU, which was only founded in 1992. Today, the EC is the EU’s most important pillar. 9 provides for the possibility of outvoting recalcitrant governments. Yet, governments within the EU regularly seek consensual outcomes and rarely vote explicitly as is common in domestic political systems. Many of these discrepancies between formal rules and de facto behavior have been documented in several individual studies and interpreted in various ways. Two rationalist theories, which advance contrasting causal mechanisms, are commonly invoked in the scholarly literature and in public debates to explain the phenomenon of informal practices in international and European politics. Simple rationalist theories expect states to evade formal rules and embrace informal practices in order to guard their autonomy. For studies in the neofunctionalist tradition, the emergence of informal practices demonstrates quite the contrary, that informal practices are usually associated with a loss of autonomy for member states. Institutions like the EU work only too well, because their very complexity provides institutional actors like the Commission with the opportunity to informally increase their power at the governments’ expense. Obviously, both explanations can’t be true at the

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