Policy Change and Discourse in Europe: Conceptual and Methodological Issues

Since the mid-1980s, the European Union, together with its member states, has undergone a major process of transformation. First with the race to the single market by 1992, then with the run-up to European Monetary Union (EMU) by 1999, and now with enlargement, the EU has seen an explosion of new policies with a panoply of new practices in the context of an expanding European economy and an emerging European polity. In attempting to describe, understand and explain the EU’s transformative experiences, the study of policy change in Europe has also undergone dramatic transformation. Empirically, from an almost exclusive focus on European integration, that is, on the process of building a European space in terms of EU-level policies, practices and politics, scholars have added a concern with Europeanisation, that is, with the impact of European integration on member state policies, practices and politics. Conceptually, on top of the ‘first generation’ studies centred on explaining the process of formation of a European sphere, where scholarly debates divided over whether the EU was fundamentally intergovernmental or neo-functionalist and, more recently, liberal intergovernmentalist, supranational, multi-level, or network-based, we now have a ‘second generation’ of studies that concentrates instead on the process of national adjustment to the EU. These scholarly debates differ over which factors best explain policy change in the process of adjustment – whether external pressures and problems, the ‘fit’ between EU-level policies and national policy legacies and preferences, actors’ problem-solving capacity in a given political-institutional setting, or ideas and discourse (see Heritier 2001; Cowles et al. 2001; Featherstone and Radaelli 2003). Methodologically, the study of European policy change has also become increasingly split among those who emphasise interest-based rationality and game-theoretic behaviour; institutional path-dependencies and historically-shaped patterns of development; social constructions of action, culture and identity; or, most recently, ideas and discourse.