Introduction: the problem-solving capacity of multi-level governance

In the post-war decades, advanced capitalist economies have developed in symbiosis with democratic political systems with a high capacity for effective regulation and welfare-state compensations. As economic integration deepens globally and even more so within the European Community, national capacities to regulate and to tax mobile capital and firms are reduced, whereas governance at European or international levels is constrained by conflicts of interest among the governments involved. Nevertheless, as the contributions to this volume show, the effectiveness of problem-solving at the national as well as at the European and international levels varies considerably from one field to another. In this introduction, I attempt to identify the factors that could explain the varying intensity and direction of competitive pressures on national regulatory systems, as well as the greater or lesser political feasibility of European or international regulation.