Review: The Europeanization of Domestic Legislatures

Abstract

THE EUROPEANIZATION OF DOMESTIC LEGISLATURES The Empirical Implications of the Myth in Nine Countries. Sylvain Brouard, Olivier Costa, Thomas Konig, eds. New York: Springer, 2012. 244PP, $116.19 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4614-1501-5Before reading this book, I used to tell my students what I suspect many readers of this review tell theirs, namely that 80 percent of national legislation in Europe originates from Brussels. Most European Union (EU) legislation must indeed be transposed into national law, either through executive decrees or ordinary laws. This means that some proportion of domestic laws are either rubberstamped by national parliaments or not even reviewed by them because they are downloaded from the EU. The proportion of 80 percent is one of those hooks we use to convince blase undergraduates that the EU is an important illustration of post-national democracy, as worthy of their interest as participatory democracy in Porto Alegre or the threat of war in the South China Sea.Fortunately, when my co-author, Julien Weisbein, and I wrote our French textbook on the EU, we did not invoke the 80 percent figure because we could not find an appropriate reference for it. Thanks to Sylvain Brouard, Olivier Costa, and Thomas Konig, we can now rely on new figures. This edited volume begins by tracing the origins of the Delors' myth, named after Jacques Delors, the former president of the European Commission, who seems to have first mentioned the 80 percent figure. It turns out that Delors was more nuanced than the myth he created. He actually said the following: 10 years, 80% of the legislation related to economics, maybe also to taxes and social affairs, will be of Community origin (emphasis mine). In the two decades that followed, commentators, from EU scholars to the Dutch Upper Chamber, expanded this prediction to include all legislation. This became a convenient truth for both Europhiles, who could thus overstate the level of supranational integration, and Euroskeptics, who could lament the creation of a European superstate.Yet even relatively cautious assertion (compared to the way I used to misquote him) turns out to be wrong. After a careful, methodical, painstaking examination of legislative production in eight EU member states (Austria, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Spain) and Switzerland, the editors of this book conclude that the proportion of domestic laws that have been adopted as a result of EU pressures ranging from six percent (in the late 1980s) to 29 percent (in the 2000s) - an upward trend, to be sure, but not quite reaching 80 percent. Furthermore, this book shows that national parliaments still scrutinize and amend EU-derived laws a great deal more than we would expect. There is, according to several contributors, no evidence that national executive power is growing at the expense of legislative power as a result of Europeanization (although it may grow because of other factors). This point suggests that the departmentalization hypothesis, according to which national parliaments are losing their autonomy both vis-a-vis the EU and vis-a-vis their own executives, is unfounded.The book is the outcome of a rare collaborative and coordinated multinational research effort. The authors use a similar research design for each country case, and they pay a great deal of attention to the challenge of operationalizing this design in different national contexts and in different languages. …