Federalism as an Institutional Order and Public Policy Regime

Abstract

Since the beginning of the 1990s, many attempts have been made to give EU a more federal dimension. However, this proved to be very difficult for several reasons: necessity to preserve the Community Method; divergences on the desirable level of federalism; growing Euroskepticism that led to the rejection of several treaties in various countries… The debates about European federalism seemed to be closed with the entry into force of the Lisbon treaty that ruled off the constitutional sequence of the 2000s. However, it has been strongly reactivated since 2010 by the Eurozone crisis, and is namely on the agenda today. Again, national and European political leaders are discussing about giving EU more federal powers in the field of financial, monetary and budgetary regulation. They are also thinking about the institutional and democratic mechanisms that are necessary to legitimate that reinforcement. What is less discussed is the ability of the EU to create and run public policies. However, from this point of view, EU seems much stronger and less sensitive to crises. As Majone put it in the 1990s, EU is a regulatory state that looks as efficient as any national state regarding its ability to develop and implement policies. It can notably rely on a European legal order described by lawyer as federal for decades. We can thus consider that, if there is something really federal about EU, it is certainly more about its activities than about its institutional order or political nature – at least today. The purpose of this panel is to answer two questions. What is really federal in the EU political regime? What is federal in its policy-making and public action? This panel will give priority to presentations that are dealing with original data. The objective is not to analyse the EU institutional order and policy-making from a theoretical or normative point of view, but to study the concrete activities of its organs and institutions.

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