When norms and rules collide: the social production of institutional conflict in the European Union

Abstract

This paper addresses the question of when and why institutional conflicts break out over decision-making competencies in the European Union. It argues there is untapped potential in constructivist approaches to explain the occurrence of such conflicts. Rationalist institutionalist (RI) models based on the idea of the Commission as a 'competence maximizer', while serving as shorthand for understanding institutional dynamics, risk producing simplistic accounts of institutional conflicts. Tensions between broad collective understandings of policy issues and formal institutional rules can help explain why the Commission initiates institutional conflict in specific instances. This general argument is formulated as a social mechanism termed the rupture mechanism, its potential demonstrated by evidence from an in-depth process tracing study of one of the most controversial institutional conflicts between the Council and the Commission in the 2000s.

Norm collisions in European Union sectoral governance during the COVID‐19 pandemic: How the European Commission reconfigures norms in crises

“…First, norm contestation is bound to specific beneficial situations (Wiener, 2018). As such, systemic ruptures, crises, may challenge the temporarily robust structure of a governance architecture and lead to the collision of ideational elements as represented by norm components (Gholiagha et al, 2020; Norman, 2015). This notion of a collision is different from the malleable nature of governance architectures, which Borrás and Radaelli describe.…”

“…Norm collisions describe conflictive situations between norms which may be latent until they are discursively activated by actors (Gholiagha et al, 2020). They bear room for the contestation of the norm(ative) framework for policy action in (EU) sectoral governance (Norman, 2015; Saltnes, 2019).…”

Revisiting the European Convention: the origins of the EP veto over international commercial treaties

“…In this vein it is generally accepted that through external triggers such as ruptures (Norman, 2015), societal interest aggregation (Moravcsik, 1993) or processes of socialization (Checkel, 2005) norms can come to constrain the tools that are available to consequentialist actors during processes of institutional change or can empower certain logics of appropriateness. Given that the Constitutional Convention was created to institutionalize the norm of democratic participation and transparency in formal treaty making, we can justifiably expect this norm to have some structural level effect on participants who are otherwise pursuing their self-interests.…”

Conceptualizing European security cooperation: Competing international political orders and domestic factors

“…We argue, contrary to many rationalist accounts, that there are no intrinsic analytical properties that prevent constructivist accounts from explaining irregular patterns of social action and interaction. Such concerns are the focus of a growing body of research focusing on how international norms and rules become the object of contestation and change (Norman, 2015; O’Mahoney, 2014; Wiener, 2004). However, an important and often underdeveloped aspect of these discussions, especially for our understanding of international cooperation, lies in specifying more clearly the interaction among pressures emanating from different, potentially competing, international institutions, and why agents act in accordance with one set of norms and practices rather than another in response to specific events.…”

“…An important aspect of such ‘crisis’ situations is that latent but highly ingrained role conceptions become activated (Guzzini, 2012: 267). In the context of the EU, Norman (2015) shows that growing tensions between self-understandings and formal institutional arrangements can activate latent institutional roles that shape strategies to overcome them. This general mechanism shares important similarities with the concept of ontological security (Mitzen, 2006; Steele, 2008), which posits that self-understandings are central to agents’ abilities to make sense of the world and their place in it.…”