European Union governance in the shadow of contradicting ideas: the decoupling of policy ideas and policy instruments

Abstract

The institutional architecture of the European Union is based on two fundamentally competing ideas: supranational rule and national sovereignty. These two underlying ideas are not reconcilable and work at different levels in the background of the policy debate. While on the normative level public sentiments remain strongly linked to the idea of state autonomy, on the cognitive level the paradigm of a functional necessity to cooperate is decisive for actual policy making. Only in some policy domains, such as the single market program, have policy-makers attempted to re-couple normative and cognitive ideas. In contrast to this, the central argument is that policy-makers mostly adhere to an alternative strategy: the systematic decoupling of normative and cognitive ideas. Focusing on public administration, it is shown how deft policy instrumentation allows actors to realize program ideas that satisfy demands for increased supranational governance. At the same time, however, these instruments are in dissonance with how policies are framed against the background of public sentiments that assume domestic bureaucratic independence.

Here to stay? Challenges to liberal environmentalism in regional climate governance

“…In a “world of regions” (Katzenstein, 2019, p. 1), the lack of comprehensive evidence about how regional organisations generate, reproduce, and implement ideas poses a considerable challenge for understanding and explaining contemporary world politics in general, and climate governance specifically. While there is a robust body of studies about the role of ideas and how they are generated through the EU (e.g., Heidbreder, 2012; Parsons, 2002), these cannot sufficiently account for non‐EU regional organisations. This article expands the literature on regional policy ideas through an account of attitudes toward liberal environmentalism among ROs.…”

How a Conversation Between EU Studies and Critical‐Constructivist IR Norm Research Illuminates a Union in Crisis: A Research Note

“…This ability to distinguish between norm‐compliant and norm‐deviant behaviour makes a stable conception of norms an asset for EU studies. It can answer the questions of whether norms matter, which norms matter (Björkdahl 2002) and under what circumstances policies in the EU become ‘Europeanised’ (also, Heidbreder 2013; Treib 2014). It is, therefore, far from surprising that when EU researchers look at contestation from a rationalist standpoint, they define it as non‐compliance with EU policies (e.g., Hobolt and Rodon 2020; Marks and Steenbergen 2002).…”

Resistances to scientific knowledge production of comparative measurements of dropout and completion in European higher education

“…Hence, there are goals that on the one hand promote the unity of the EHEA and on the other call for convergence in national objectives on progress in these issues, despite careful use of the word ‘invites’. Moreover, earlier studies conclude that there are two fundamental competing ideas in the EU’s institutional architecture: either supranational rule and national sovereignty (Heidbreder, 2013) or the trend towards convergence in the educational area – this despite the differences in domestic educational systems, the differences in both their way of organising them and in their ‘cultural homogeneity-heterogeneity, religious demographics, type of state, political party constellations, type of response to and interaction with global processes’ (Daun, 2011).…”