Abstract
The past and arguably the future of the European Union (EU) are characterized by Differentiated Integration (DI). Whereas a number of studies examine country variance in the realization of DI due to state-level characteristics, scholars have rarely addressed sector-specific differentiation. We select Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) for such an analysis – the policy domain with the largest budget, most contestation in the Council of Ministers, most redistribution, and most differentiated legal acts. Building on liberal intergovernmentalism, we develop a demand and supply model to explain the number of opt-outs a country realizes in CAP legislation. We hypothesize that the member states’ demand for differentiation is driven by agricultural lobbyism and by the political receptiveness of governments; the supply-side is driven by member states’ voting or bargaining power; and the realized differentiations are a consequence of the interaction of demand and supply. Using all differentiations in new CAP legal acts from 1993 to 2012, we test these hypotheses in a time-series cross-section design. We find that the domestic level of agricultural protectionism, conservative parties in government and voting power are robust predictors of the realization of differentiation in CAP. Our results support the general claim of liberal intergovernmentalism, that domestic societal and economic interests and political bargaining power shape the course of (differentiated) integration.
Highlights
The long political and academic debate about differentiated integration (DI) in the European Union (EU) has reached another peak since the late 1990s: it was sparked off by Eastern enlargement and the related differentiation in primary law (Schimmelfennig and Winzen 2014) and recently reinforced by Brexit, leading to a discussion of “differentiated disintegration” (Schimmelfennig 2018)
Before we develop our theory on the demand and supply of differentiations from Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) legal acts, we need to clarify to what the differentiations substantially extend
We argued that the capability of member states to achieve the desired outcome depends on their voting power within Council negotiations and their economic power
Summary
The long political and academic debate about differentiated integration (DI) in the European Union (EU) has reached another peak since the late 1990s: it was sparked off by Eastern enlargement and the related differentiation in primary law (Schimmelfennig and Winzen 2014) and recently reinforced by Brexit, leading to a discussion of “differentiated disintegration” (Schimmelfennig 2018). We define the phenomenon of “differentiation” as a situation where one or more EU member states are permitted to not apply certain legal rules of the European Treaties or EU secondary law. This way the uniform integration process gets differentiated across member states and policy fields. Most of the literature concentrated on explaining primary law differentiation, whereas secondary law differentiation earned less attention (see, Tuytschaever 1999; Duttle 2016). As Winzen (2016) and Duttle et al (2017) find that differentiation varies considerably across policy domains, we consider it a promising contribution to analyze sectorspecific differentiated integration
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