European Integration, Policy Autonomy and Partisan Politics
| Author | Jakob De Haan,Thomas Plümper |
| DOI | 10.1177/1465116506063843 |
| Published date | 01 June 2006 |
| Date | 01 June 2006 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
European Integration, Policy
Autonomy and Partisan
Politics
Jakob de Haan
University of Groningen, The Netherlands
Thomas Plümper
University of Essex, UK
163
European Union Politics
DOI: 10.1177/1465116506063843
Volume 7 (2): 163–166
Copyright© 2006
SAGE Publications
London, Thousand Oaks CA,
New Delhi
European integration reduces the policy autonomy of the member states of
the European Union (EU). For instance, the harmonization of regulation, the
common monetary policy of the European Central Bank (ECB), and the rules
of the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) concerning national fiscal policy all
lead to an erosion of national policy autonomy. Indeed, in the popular
discourse on Europe, there is a widespread belief that nowadays most, if not
all, policies come from ‘Brussels’ and that, therefore, national politics no
longer matter.
Of course, this is not true for a variety of reasons. First, the EU has not
harmonized all possible policy areas and has no intention to do so. Since much
is left for the nation-state and subnational polities, politicians may still
disagree with each other. Second, even in the policy domains in which the
EU members have agreed to harmonize policies, these efforts often fall short
of leading to full convergence, thereby leaving some room for policy diver-
gence between countries. Political parties can use the remaining degrees of
freedom to formulate diverging positions. Third, since politicians know that
EU harmonization leads to an erosion of credible policy disagreement, they
may at one point be reluctant to push ahead with EU harmonization simply
to maintain leverage for political disagreement. In other words, democratic
politics require disagreement and, since politicians are aware of this, they are
unlikely fully to codify regulations and policies at the EU level even if full
harmonization were an efficient and viable solution (which, of course, it is
not). For all these reasons, European integration will not completely remove
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