THE CONCEPT OF AN EXPANDED EUROPEAN MULTI-LEVEL SYSTEM.
The European integration process has expanded political space, blurring national borders. This development did not leave the political system untouched. Common policy-making within the ‘Staatenverbund’ of the EU not only affected governments of member states, but furthermore an Europeanization has taken place that is ‘enlarging the scope of the relevant unit of policy-making’ (Kohler-Koch 2000: 22). This enlarged scope was first acknowledged in theory by Putnam in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when he attempted to pin it down by using the concept of ‘two-level games’ (Putnam 1988). According to this concept, domestic groups pursue ‘their interests by pressuring the government to adopt favorable policies and politicians are seeking power by constructing coalitions among those groups’ (Putnam 1988: 430). On the international level national governments try ‘to maximize their own ability to satisfy domestic pressures, while minimizing the adverse consequences of foreign developments’ (Putnam 1988: 430). Putnam assumes that in international negotiations on international co-operation domestic actors put pressure on governments at the national level to gain leverage, and that on the international level governments use negotiations to meet or escape domestic actors’ interests. Both levels are simultaneously involved in negotiations in this concept, and cannot be treated separately as a two-step process but must rather be seen as a reciprocal process of influence. Most authors modeling multi-level interaction between the EU and the international level analyze multi-level games based on Putnam’s assumption by dividing the second, the international, level into EU and international levels (see among others Patterson 1997 and CoUinson 1999). They concentrate on changes in the institutional set-up within countries or within the power relations of the actors at the European level. The main focus has been on likely shifts of competence from one level to the other, conventionalized as zero-sum games between clearly distinct levels. The central actors in the model are governments.
Two developments must be conceptualized differently. First, we can observe a tendency to blur boundaries and Tran nationalization. The nature of international negotiations has shown that significant territorial boundaries between national and international politics (as well as among national, European and international politics) which developed with the rise of modern nation-states could not be maintained. Governmental space and the scope of unsolved problems are increasingly diverging. Thus the division between inside and outside is vanishing and the functional capacity of the nation-state is questioned (see Brock and Albert 1995). In an application to European integration, Kohler-Koch assumes that interaction beyond national borders together with the functional differentiation of society are leading to a functionally (instead of territorially) defined construction of political space and the drawing of new functional boundaries (Kohler-Koch 1998). As a result, political competences are shifted and sometimes superimposed across the varying levels. Second, the discussion on the ‘Europe of the Regions’ and the analysis of European structural policy have shown that a two-level approach is far too restricted to grasp the complexity of European governance. In the late 1980s and early 1990s acknowledgement of the so-called third (regional) level and the involvement of sub national actors in the complex system of the European decision-making process drew attention to policy-making across the levels (Marks 1993; Jachtenfuchs and Kohler-Koch 1996; Knodt 1998; Hooghe and Marks 2001). Analysis of policy-making across levels within the European system, which is the aim of this article, does not explore shifts in the balance of power between levels of government but is concerned with changes in the mode of governance. The very nature of the European multi-level system comprising supranational institutions, member states, and sub national and private actors— engenders a different kind of governing. The joint exercise of sovereignty in the EU has two consequences: it enlarges the territorial scope for political action ‘beyond the nation-state’ and it incorporates the member states into a complex transnational, multi-level system of decision-making. Being a member of the EU has the consequence that political institutions, i.e. governing agents, have lost their exclusive privilege of authoritative allocation.
Following this logic, the core characteristics of a European system of governance could be described as:
1. Polycentric systems, where various centers of decision-making exist that are formally independent of each other. The hierarchical centre of the system is replaced by functional networks (Kohler-Koch 1999)
2. Split into multiple, overlapping arenas characterized by loose coupling (Benz 2000; Hooghe and Marks 2001). These interlocked arenas include different actors, whose interests diverge.
3. The organizing principle of political relations within the European system is based on consociation, which helps actors to manage heterogeneity within political communities.
4. Consensual policy-making relies heavily on interaction and communication between its entities (Knodt 2000). Thus, accumulation of knowledge, collective learning, and the exchange of ideas and concepts are significant. The multi-level governance approach enquires into the institutional structuring of decision-making processes in such a polycentric system. In the course of increased internationalization and the growing regulation of international relations the international level has become a focus of EU research. The international sphere should not just be added to the system as a separate level – as shown in the studies of^ three-level games – but rather included in the interactive multi-level European system as described above.
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