Mareike Kleine - Informal Governance in the European Union: How Governments Make International Organizations Work
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- Book:Informal Governance in the European Union: How Governments Make International Organizations Work
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The European Union is the worlds most advanced international organization, presiding over a level of legal and economic integration unmatched in global politics. To explain this achievement, many observers point to its formal rules that entail strong obligations and delegate substantial power to supranational actors such as the European Commission. This legalistic view, Mareike Kleine contends, is misleading. More often than not, governments and bureaucrats informally depart from the formal rules and thereby contradict their very purpose. Behind the EUs front of formal rules lies a thick network of informal governance practices.If not the EUs rules, what accounts for the high level of economic integration among its members? How does the EU really work? In answering these questions, Kleine proposes a new way of thinking about international organizations. Informal governance affords governments the flexibility to resolve conflicts that adherence to EU rules may generate at the domestic level. By dispersing the costs that integration may impose on individual groups, it allows governments to keep domestic interests aligned in favor of European integration. The combination of formal rules and informal governance therefore sustains a level of cooperation that neither regime alone permits, and it reduces the EUs democratic deficit by including those interests into deliberations that are most immediately affected by its decisions. In illustrating informal norms and testing how they work, Kleine provides the first systematic analysis, based on new material from national and European archives and other primary data, of the parallel development of the formal rules and informal norms that have governed the EU from the 1958 Treaty of Rome until today.
Mareike Kleine: author's other books
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Elaine Jing Zhao
Henrik Selin
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INFORMAL
GOVERNANCE
IN THE
EUROPEAN
UNION
GOVERNANCE
IN THE
EUROPEAN
UNION
How Governments Make International
Organizations Work
Organizations Work
Mareike Kleine
CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ITHACA AND LONDON
Dem Angedenken meiner lieben Eltern
Contents
Figures and Tables
Figures
Tables
Preface
Informality might be the rule rather than the exception in politics. Behind the scenes and alongside official procedures seems to be where many important decisions are being made. This has become evident not least during the crisis of the Eurozone. For example, since the EU treaty (Treaty of Lisbon, Article 125) prohibits member states from bailing out countries with excessive debt, the member states agreed first to emergency bailout measures outside the EUs official procedures. Some argue that the European Central Bank transgressed its mandate by announcing its commitment to purchase sovereign debt from troubled Eurozone members in the secondary market. In fact, the list of examples where important decision makers eschewed or bent the formal rules during the current crisis is endless.
But informality is not just a phenomenon of the Eurozone crisis. When I embarked on my doctoral studies in Berlinthe EU was still in good orderI was bothered by the incongruence between theory and reality in the analysis of decision making in the European Union (EU). Those in the policy world who made a living detailing how the EU worked in practice rarely offered an explanation of why this was the case. Yet those in the academic world who offered explanations of the EUs official rules and procedures often seemed to miss how decision making in the EU worked in reality. Indeed, then as now, many scholars ignore actual decision-making practices, even or especially if these do not quite conform to the formal rules, or consider them as negligible or as statistical noise that defies any systematic description and explanation. As a result, we know little about why decision makers sometimes stick to formal rules and at other times seek a way around them. Where and why do these practices of informal governance exist? Why are they more prevalent in some institutional settings and issue areas than in others? Is informal governance a good or a bad thing?
To me, the mystified doctoral student, this discrepancy between formal rules and informal practices was most consequential in the case of the EUs Council presidency, a position held consecutively by each member government for six months. Barely mentioned in the treaties, the Council presidency was an institution that many agreed informally enjoyed substantial authority in the legislative process. Yet most models of legislative bargaining in the EU neglected this institution.
Puzzled and confused, I arrived at Princeton. I thought I was on to something really interesting. I just couldnt explain why. Hoping for an epiphany, I took a couple of classes in different subfields and disciplines. I got even more confused. Hoping for confirmation that I had indeed discovered an important puzzle, I talked to my advisers. You doctoral students today, Andy Moravcsik exclaimed, studying these boring tiny instances while there is a whole world of informal practices out there. I was overwhelmed. Wouldnt studying more informal practices only compound my confusion?
I never had an epiphany. I did follow Andys advice, however, and went to Brussels and searched numerous archives to discover more instances where the EUs formal procedures said one thing and governments did something else. To get a better picture of what was going on, I constructed a stylized model of the EUs legislative process and defined the behavior one would expect from governments and supranational actors if decision making were governed solely by formal rules. I then compared this behavior to the practices on the ground and called the discrepancy informal governance. The result of this exercise was remarkable. I found a whole web of informal governance around the EUs legislative process. More important, these practices, although stable over time, appeared to vary systematically across issue areas. The Council presidency, which prompted this project, turned out to be just the tip of a massive iceberg of informal governance. As I got a better picture of the patterns of formal and informal governance, the many things I had learned in class and what I knew about the EU slowly fell into place.
The central argument of this book is that informal governance provides added flexibilitya flexibility that states use to resolve potentially disruptive conflicts that their cooperation at the interstate level suddenly stirs up at the domestic level.
The logic is the following. Although it is clear, for example, that an EU-wide regulation of lightbulbs creates not only winners but also losers that have to bear the burden of adjusting to the new law, who benefits and who loses, the extent of these adjustment costs as well as when these costs accrue, is not always entirely predictable. Suddenly confronted with unexpected costs, a domestic group mobilizes against this regulation to an extent that its government is pressured into delaying, obstructing, or even openly defying it. I call this problem political uncertainty.
Political uncertainty is a problem for everyone, because when states defy the law then the very basis of cooperation, namely stable expectations about one anothers commitment, seems potentially brittle. To keep this basis for the EUs smooth operation intact, states collectively depart from the rules that allow for imposing costs on one another in order to accommodate governments under exceedingly strong domestic pressure: they concede just enough to restore such governments incentive to cooperate. Because it allows for changing the timing, extent, and distribution of adjustment costs, informal governance permits states to manipulate one anothers domestic politics of collective action in a way that keeps domestic interests aligned in favor of cooperation. It makes cooperation work.
Although confined to economic integration within the EU, the theory developed in this book sheds important light on current events and other international organizations as well. Consider again the Eurozone crisis. The book is about how frequent disruptions to the domestic politics of collective action lead to the routine use of informal governance through which governments sustain a very high level of cooperation. In the current crisis the Eurozone members are dealing with unprecedented shocks on a massive scale to their highly interdependent economies. However, the challenge that policymakers face in both situations is similar: the defection of one of them, be it in the form of obstruction, delay, outright noncompliance, or exit from the Eurozone, hurts everyone because it undermines the credibility of the institution itself. Accordingly, the Eurozone members are not only concerned about the direct economic consequences of the crisis. They are also concerned that, for example, a Greek exit from the Eurozone or the reintroduction of national currencies in another country will cast doubt on the Eurozones very stability, damage the euros credibility, and thus harm all of them (Financial Times 2012b). The EU member governments consequently resort to informal governance practices when sticking to formal procedures would not prevent such scenarios from becoming reality.
Thus, just as the governments in this book depart from formal rules in day-to-day EU politics in order to avert excessive domestic mobilization against EU laws, so leaders in the current crisis use informal governance to prevent crisis-ridden governments from caving in to oppositional domestic forces. The result is a nerve-racking balancing act in which, for example, creditors and EU institutions vociferously insist that debtors follow the rules and duly implement the conditions tied to bailouts; yet there is often no alternative for creditors but to create just enough informal wiggle room regarding the timing and amount of debt payments to prevent the debtor governments from losing important votes and caving in to domestic pressure for exit (Financial Times 2012a).
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