Since the mid-1980s, Fritz W. Scharpf has been investigating the evolution of the multilevel European polity and its impact on the effectiveness and legitimacy of democratic government in Europe. Community and Autonomy collects in one volume Scharpfs nearly two decades of research on government in Europe and offers new contributions that focus on the asymmetric impact of European law on the institutions and policy legacies of EU member states and on the implications of these asymmetries for the democratic legitimacy of government at national and European levels. Seit Mitte der 1980er Jahre beobachtet Fritz W. Scharpf die Entwicklung der Effektivität und Legitimität europäischer Mehrebenenpolitik. Zu Beginn der hier versammelten Aufsätze steht die Vermutung, die 'Politikverflechtungsfalle' beschränke generell die Problemlösungsfähigkeit europäischer Politik. Später betont Scharpf die Asymmetrie zwischen wirksamer 'negativer' und schwacher 'positiver Integration'. Er benennt aber auch die Bereiche, in denen effektive europäische Politik erwartet werden kann oder ausgeschlossen scheint. Scharpfs Blick richtet sich auf die institutionellen Bedingungen, welche die Rechtsetzung und Politikgestaltung begünstigen und zugleich politisches Handeln auf der europäischen Ebene behindern. Nicht zuletzt betrachtet er die Rückwirkungen des EU-Rechts auf die Institutionen und Politiktraditionen der Mitgliedsstaaten.

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Fritz W. Scharpf ist emeritierter Direktor des Max-Planck-Instituts für Gesellschaftsforschung in Köln.

Introduction Community and Autonomy in the European Union The essays in this volume record a quarter-century of refl ections on the multilevel European polity and its impact on the effectiveness and legitimacy of democratic government in Europe. Re-reading them in the order in which they were published, I fi nd it interesting to see how themes that were mentioned as an aside early on evolved over time, and how the overall view of the institutional structure and its empirical and normative implications has become progressively wider and more complex, even though the individual articles focus on a relatively narrow range of specifi c issues. Thus my present map of the overall terrain would include a view of policy making at the European level that distinguishes between its political and non-political modes and that focuses on the specifi c problem- solving capabilities and legitimacy conditions of each of these modes. It would also include a view of the impact of European integration on the problemsolving capacity, democratic legitimacy and the socioeconomic orders of EU member states, and, fi nally, it would include a view of the mechanisms that may (or may not) adjust the balance between the equally legitimate concerns of European integration and of democratic selfdetermination in EU member states. In this introduction, I will roughly follow the sequence in which I came to pay attention to these themes. Problemsolving Effectiveness My fi rst contribution, and one of my most cited articles, focuses entirely on what I would now call the political mode of EU policy making, and it presents a very skeptical view of the Communitys problem-solving capacity. Though published in 1988, it was written in 1983/84 (i.e., before the adoption of the Single- Market program), and it compares the effects of intergovernmental bargaining on policy outcomes in German federalism and in the European Community. In Germany, we had explained the blockades and suboptimal policy outcomes (which our policy studies had identifi ed in certain fi elds) by the dependence of national programs on the (nearly) unanimous agreement of Länder governments. Taking the state of the Common Agricultural Policy as an example, the article suggested that similar institutional conditions would also create a jointdecision trap (JDT) at the European level. With the benefi t of hindsight (cf. Chapter 10), it was easy to show that the basic explanatory model (which anticipated George Tsebelis [2002] theory of Veto Players) remains valid wherever its assumed institutional conditions are in force. But the popularity of the article on the citation index owes probably even more to the fact that it was also easy to show that these conditions do not exist everywhere, and that even where they exist, they will not always generate policy blockades or compromises on the lowest common denominator. Legislative and Judicial Policy Making In my subsequent work (beginning in Chapters 2 and 3, and fully developed in Chapter 7), I have clarifi ed the domain and the limits of the JDT model by distinguishing between the political and the non-political modes of policy making at the European level. Political modes are defi ned by the fact that member- state governments retain signifi cant veto powers. This is not only true of purely intergovernmental negotiations over Treaty revisions and unanimous policy choices, but also of European legislation in the Community Mode which requires an initiative of the Commission and a majority in the European Parliament. But since the agreement of at least a qualifi ed majority of memberstate governments in the Council of Ministers remains necessary in all cases, the constellation continues to fi t the analytical category of a joint-decision system (Scharpf 1997: 143-145; Chapter 7 in this volume). In other words, European legislation in the political mode does depend on very broad agreement among a wide variety of veto actorsand hence the mechanisms suggested by the JDT model may apply. This is not so where European policy choices can be adopted in the nonpolitical mode by supranational agencies. Within specifi c policy domains, the European Central Bank (ECB), the European Commission and the European Court of Justice (ECJ) have the power to act without the involvement of national governments (or of the European Parliament, for that matter). For most purposes, moreover, these agencies can be modeled as a unitary actor (rather than as a constellation of internal veto players). Within their fi elds of competence, in other words, the institutional preconditions of the JDT model do not applyand hence there will be policy areas where the European capacity for effective action is not impeded by the mechanisms specifi ed in the fi rst article. Thus the ECB has full competence over monetary policy for the Euro area, and it is more completely shielded from political directives or interference than any national central bank (Articles 105, 108 ECT). The same is true of the European Commission when it is defi ning and applying competition rules for private companies and public enterprises and when it is controlling state aids that might distort market competition (Articles 81-89 ECT). But while the policy areas and policy goals that are to be served by these mandates are reasonably well specifi ed in Treaty provisions adopted by intergovernmental agreement, there are no similar substantive purposes circumscribing the Commissions power to initiate Treaty infringement proceedings against a member state (Article 226 ECT), let alone the Courts power to interpret and apply Community law (Articles 220234 ECT). Both of the nonpolitical powers have been used to massively undermine the position of member states. Since the power to apply implies a power to interpret the law and thus to defi ne the domain of its application, the normative dividing line between legitimate interpretation and illegitimate judicial legislation is diffi cult to defi ne even in national polities. But there, the unquestioned normative priority of democratically legitimated rule-making over judicial rule interpretation is matched in practice by the ability of parliamentary majorities to correct judicial decisions that misconstrue the legislative intent. And even in countries where the judiciary may also review the constitutionality of legislation, its choices are politically constrained by intense public debate, and they may generally be corrected through qualifi ed majorities. In other words, judicial law-making occurs in the shadow of democratically legitimated political authority. In the relationship between the European Union and its member states, by contrast, ECJ decisions based on an interpretation of the Treaty can only be corrected by the unanimous adoption of a Treaty amendment that has to be ratifi ed in all twenty-seven member states, and attempts to correct the interpretation of directives and regulations are impeded by all the obstacles implied by the JDT. In other words, the potential range of politically uncontrolled judicial legislation is far wider in the EU than it is in any national constitutional democracy (Chapters 3, 4 and 7). The foundations of this awesome power of the judiciary were already laid by two famous ECJ decisions in the early 1960s that postulated the direct effect of European law and its supremacy over all law of the member states. Their policymaking effectiveness, however, did not become manifest before the end of the 1970s. When harmonization directives were blocked in the Council, judicial authority was able to simply disallow national regulations by defi ning them as nontariff barriers that interfered with the economic liberties of importers and exporters. While the effectiveness and the normative ambiguities of this integration through law were soon recognized b...

Contents Acknowledgments ... 7 Copyright Acknowledgments ... 8 Introduction Community and Autonomy in the European Union (2010) ... 11 1 The Joint-decision Trap: Lessons from German Federalism and European Integration (1988) ... 21 2 Community and Autonomy: Multilevel Policy-making in the European Union (1994) ... 67 3 Negative and Positive Integration in the Political Economy of European Welfare States (1996) ... 91 4 The Problem-solving Capacity of Multilevel Governance (1997) ... 127 5 Interdependence and Democratic Legitimation (2000) ... 149 6 Democratic Legitimacy under Conditions of Regulatory Competition: Why Europe Differs from the United States (2001) ... 173 7 Notes Toward a Theory of Multilevel Governing in Europe (2001) ... 193 8 The European Social Model: Coping with the Challenges of Diversity (2002) ... 221 9 Legitimate Diversity: The New Challenge of European Integration (2003) ... 247 10 The Joint-decision Trap Revisited (2006) ... 277 11 Refl ections on Multilevel European Legitimacy (2007) ... 299 12 Legitimacy in the Multilevel European Polity (2009) ... 317 13 The Double Asymmetry of European Integration—Or: Why the EU Cannot Be a Social Market Economy (2009) ... 353