Beyond forbearance? Mapping and assessing the EU’s emergent compliance promotion architecture

The EU has a highly centralised, potentially powerful instrument for enforcement: the European Commission can instigate infringement procedures against member states that violate EU policies. Yet, recent research has suggested that the Commission curtails enforcement to ensure member states’ political support for new policy decisions. This article argues that this perspective is compelling, but incomplete. Over the past decades, the EU has constructed a variegated compliance promotion architecture in addition to the infringement procedure, spanning the vertical, horizontal, and domestic arenas and comprising managerialist, constructivist and rationalist strategies. The article sketches this emergent architecture, illustrates its sectoral variation, assesses its effectiveness, and provides an agenda for future research on EU compliance promotion. It concludes by discussing the preconditions for the effective functioning of the architecture, arguing that these alternative instruments have an important part to play, but ultimately require a firm shadow of hierarchy in cases of persistent member state opposition to EU law.