Subsidiarity and Eu Multilevel Governance: Actors, Networks and Agendas by Serafin Pazos-Vidal

Author:Serafin Pazos-Vidal [Pazos-Vidal, Serafin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9780429842528
Google: VpCKDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 42872786
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-02-25T00:00:00+00:00

Europe 2020, subsidiarity and subnational authorities

Europe 2020 affects national and subnational powers inevitably raising questions of subsidiarity. As the UK was one of the most reticent MS concerning the expansion of EU competence it can be used to illustrate these concerns: the UK Government consistently refused to agree to any national commitment with respect to those Europe 2020 goals that it regarded as concerning national exclusive competences (e.g. the fight against social exclusion, education, employment and pensions). The 2014 UK NRP is a good example: such is the rejection of any pretence of EU interference that even when the UK is actually outperforming Europe 2020 goals, the UK Government refers in its otherwise very detailed NRPs exclusively to its own “government objectives”. It went as far as arguing that such goals do not even exist as such, referring to them as “European Council Conclusions” of 10 June 2010 (Drumaux and Joyce 2014, 8–11). The UK Parliament broadly agrees with the Government approach,9 as they perceived many Europe 2020 goals as being not robustly defined, conflicting with the principles of conferral and subsidiarity as they often refer to national competences, and disagree that the EU proposals meet the “proximity”, “scale” and “effect” tests (UK House of Commons 2011a, 76–79).

While the UK has been a particularly punctilious MS it is not alone in expressing such subsidiarity concerns, notably the Committee of the Regions (2012, 17–26). Many NRPs fail to address the multilevel nature of the challenges that they map out (Drumaux and Joyce 2014, 11). Hence the Commission itself is increasingly realising that addressing themselves only to the central government will not effect change on the ground and has started to provide additional guidance to national governments so that they involve subnational authorities in drafting the NRPs and delivering Europe 2020-related Structural Fund priorities (Spatial Foresight 2015).

CoR’s Europe 2020 Monitoring Platform has undertaken a notable role of policy entrepreneur in addressing the territorial blindness of Europe 2020: in most MS except Belgium, Sweden, the Netherlands and partly the UK territorial authorities are entirely absent from the Semester process, even when they are the competent authorities. In most cases their involvement is protocolary rather than a meaningful discussion (CoR 2015a; Pucher and Martinos 2015).10 Indeed, both this and other CoR-sponsored research (CoR 2017a; Pucher and Martinos 2017, 53–54; Pucher and Schausberger 2017, 20, 31–33) point out a strong correlation between each MS institutional structure (more involvement where there is stronger local/regional autonomy, such as North-West Europe and federal/regionalised states) and political culture (more involvement in MS with consociative, multiparty, corporatist or with strong collective bargaining traditions) as key determinants of the level of subnational involvement in drafting, evaluating and including territorial elements into NRPs. In other words, the Semester is treated not as a stand-alone process but as a by-product of existing interinstitutional or social dialogue practices. This neatly mirrors the available evidence of national variation in the other major EU policy with an inbuilt multilevel dimension, Cohesion Policy (vid. Chapter 6). Indeed,

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