Reforming the European Union: Realizing the Impossible
Daniel Finke, Sven-Oliver Proksch
Language: English
Pages: 248
ISBN: 0691153930
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
For decades the European Union tried changing its institutions, but achieved only unsatisfying political compromises and modest, incremental treaty revisions. In late 2009, however, the EU was successfully reformed through the Treaty of Lisbon. Reforming the European Union examines how political leaders ratified this treaty against all odds and shows how this victory involved all stages of treaty reform negotiations--from the initial proposal to referendums in several European countries.
The authors emphasize the strategic role of political leadership and domestic politics, and they use state-of-the-art methodology, applying a comprehensive data set for actors' reform preferences. They look at how political leaders reacted to apparent failures of the process by recreating or changing the rules of the game. While domestic actors played a significant role in the process, their influence over the outcome was limited as leaders ignored negative referendums and plowed ahead with intended reforms. The book's empirical analyses shed light on critical episodes: strategic agenda setting during the European Convention, the choice of ratification instrument, intergovernmental bargaining dynamics, and the reaction of the German Council presidency to the negative referendums in France, the Netherlands, and Ireland.
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Irish government still preferred the status quo and consequently abstained from campaigning in favor of the treaty in the first referendum. For the second referendum, the support of the Irish government was won by additional concessions in the fields of abortion, taxation, and military neutrality and the amended Treaty of Lisbon was supported by 67 percent of the Irish voters at a voter turnout of 59 percent on 2 October 2009. So this is why we wrote this book: to show, how over the many long.
(0.110) 0.075 (0.016)*** -0.028 (0.019) Member States Delegate Government (dummy) National Parliament (dummy) EU accession EU accountability Left-Right Sample Unit of analysis Table 2.1. Predicting Convention position estimates. Revealing Constitutional Preferences • 75 statistically significant for both member states and candidate countries. There is, however, a difference between the two: member state delegate positions are explained by their national party position on.
Council 2001). The governments also decided on the overall composition of the 105-member Convention. It was dominated by members of national parliaments (56 members, including opposition and anti EU parties) and representatives from member state governments themselves (28 members). Other members included a delegation from the European Parliament (16 members) and the European Commission (2 members). Whereas each of these component groups chose their respective representatives, the governments.
When ratifying the Treaty of Lisbon. Focusing exclusively on those countries whose governments announced referendums or, even worse, only on the subset of negative referendums, carries the risk of drawing biased inference. In our example, excluding cases with parliamentary ratification from the analysis would make it difficult to explain why political leaders from countries with a strong tradition in direct democracy, nonbinding referendums, and insufficient support on the part of parliamentary.
Percent on 12 June 2008. As a consequence, the reform-skeptical Czech President Václav Klaus and Polish President Lech Kaczyński declared they would delay signing the Treaty of Lisbon until Ireland had accepted it. On 12 December 2008, the Irish Prime Minister announced a second referendum after political leaders from the other member states conceded to Ireland’s demand to keep one Commissioner per country. The European Council also agreed on guarantees in a Finke.indb 176 5/7/2012 10:34:59 AM.