Harmonisation and convergence? National responses to the common European transport policy.
| Verfasser | Lehmkuhl, Dirk |
Abstract
Over the past decade, an increasing amount of scholarly attention has been shifted away from processes of institution-building and policy-making at the European level and, instead, has focused on the impact of European integration on national political and administrative institutions, policies and politics. Coined as Europeanisation, this strand of research challenges expectations of far a reaching harmonization and convergence of policies and politics in EU Member States. Rather, it has been shown that European influences are processed differently in the Member States, and, thus, are causing differential responses at the national level. Comparing road haulage and railway policies in five European countries, the article provides evidence for Europe's differential impact. It identifies a spectrum of reforms of national transport markets, with a hard-core, pro-competitive disengagement of the state in Britain at the one end and an Italian-style refusal of reform by private actors at the other, while France, Germany and the Netherlands ranging between these poles.
Introduction (1)
Since its early days, research on European integration has primarily addressed processes of institution-building and policymaking at the European level. In theoretical terms, the debate between neofunctionalism, (liberal) intergovernmentalism, and, more recently, constructivist and multilevel governance approaches helped to cope with the dynamics and particularities of the emerging European polity. In empirical terms, there is a rich body of literature that describes both similarities and differences between policy sectors. Contrasting this rich theoretical and empirical knowledge about the "bottom-up" perspective at the European level, relatively little attention has been paid to the impact of European integration on domestic political and social processes of the Member States. Only over the past decade, an increasing amount of scholarly attention has focused on the consequences of European integration in the framework of the EU for national political and administrative institutions, policies and politics.
The concept of Europeanisation, however, is still subject of controversial debates involving its definition, domains or focus and scope of research. (2) For the present purpose, Europeanisation refers to the question of how European decisions impact upon Member States' political and administrative structures and policies. More specifically, the article is concerned with the extent to which the implementation of European policies implies changes to domestic institutions such as dominant regulatory approaches, decisionmaking structures and patterns of implementation in a particular policy sector. By providing an in-depths analysis of the changes in the road haulage and railway policies in five European countries, that is France, Great Britain, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, the article addresses the question of whether or not the ever increasing European integration and the implementation of European provisions leads to a harmonisation and convergence in the Member States. So doing, the article is concerned with two important parts of a sector that in both its infrastructure and its service dimension is genuinely transboundary and, as such, is at the heart of the common market project. Moreover, its focus on four larger countries and on the Netherlands, enables it to capture the dynamics in the countries that are of particular importance in the development of European policies in general and of transport policy in particular.
The article is structured into two broad parts. The first part sets out to present the empirical information by first giving a brief summary of the EU provisions on road haulage and railway policy. It then turns to the overview of the changes in the transport policies in the five countries under review. While the first part of the article is largely descriptive, the second part has a more analytical orientation. Its purpose is to provide answers to the questions of whether a tendency towards harmonisation and convergence could be observed or, if not, what factors may explain differences in the responses of Member States to EU policies.
European Transport Policies and National Responses
European Transport Policies
Despite the Treaty of Rome's call for the establishment of a Common Transport Policy, the transport sector has only recently undergone profound change. European transport markets had been characterised by separate national markets governed by contrasting regulatory approaches, and interstate agreements regulating aspects of international transport. Given the heterogeneity in the regulatory approaches in the Member States, it was hardly surprising that a Common Transport Policy took off only since the mid 1980s.
Frustrated by the high demand for consensus in the European Council of Ministers and the persistently diverging interest of the Member States, the European Commission changed its strategy to progress the achievement of a Common Transport Policy since the late 1970s. Instead of trying to harmonise national transport regulations by prescribing detailed EU provisions which had to be implemented by the Member States, the Commission linked its concept of a European transport policy to the general idea of the Single European Market, that is a free flow of persons, goods, services and capital within the boundaries of the European Union.
In the case of road haulage, the Commission's objective was to create a single market for transport services offered throughout Europe irrespective of the nationality of the road haulage companies. Cutting prices and increasing the quality of services were supposed to enhance the competitiveness of European economies in general and of the transport industry in particular (Kerwer, 2001: p. 175). To achieve this objective, a major effort was made to overcome a situation in which cross-border transport markets were governed by bilateral agreements. Thus, decisive steps on the way towards a European road haulage market were the liberalization of international and, in particular, the right for non-resident hauliers to operate on other Member States (cabotage).
Given the progress in achieving a Common Transport Policy, European provisions on technical, social, environmental and fiscal matters warrant that nowadays (in international transport markets) all hauliers are subject to the same pricing regime. However, the emphasis must be put on 'international' transport, since the European provisions in principle do not effect the existing national regulations. Or, to be more precise, they affect national regulations only in cases when they either hamper the free flow of goods or violate provisions on competition policy and state aids. Every single measure opposing the principle of a free flow of services and to privileges domestic over foreign enterprises is seen as irregular. It is in this dimension that the national autonomy of regulation was eroded by the advent of a common European transport policy. European provisions do not affect the existence of those national regulations that are only concerned with regulating domestic transport, such as tariff systems (Lehmkuhl, 1999: p. 76-78).
The situation is quite similar in the case of the railways. In order to supplement the intermodal competition between rail and road (and, in addition, in some countries also waterways), the intramodal competition among different railway companies on a European scale was at the heart of the European Commission's policy objective. The idea that incumbent and possibly newly emerging railway companies may provide transport services by rail represents a significant departure from the established opinion that for technical and economic reasons (such as high sunk costs in infrastructure and rolling stock) railways are "natural monopolies" and must be protected. The Commission pushed this idea for mainly two reasons. On the one hand, concerning the idea of introducing competition of different suppliers on the same infrastructure, the railways were just but one further case in the line of the Commission's efforts to realise the Single Market Program in the area of public utilities such as telecommunication and electricity. On the other hand, the Commission's goal to revitalise the European railways by strengthening its competitive position in relation to other modes of transport was closely linked to the objective to increase the environmental sustainability of transport (Kerwer and Teutsch, 2001b: pp. 40-41).
The policies pursued to achieve this objective have an organisational (the application of new management techniques and a reformulation of the relationship between the railways and the state in contractual terms) and a regulatory (a separation of infrastructure and operation and the introduction of rules for market access and operation) dimension. The instruments on which the Commission recruited, however, were largely restricted to directions--which, according to the EC Treaty, do not prescribe a specific model but only specify goals, thus granting Member States a significant leeway when implementing them.
As a consequence, to date the achievements of the Common European Railway Policy are rather limited: for instance, the separation of infrastructure and operation has been restricted to accounting (and not to institutional separation) and despite the joint efforts of the European Commission and some Member States (especially the Netherlands) the project of trans-European rail freeways for freight is based on the voluntary agreement of the Member States and, accordingly, has not yet significantly progressed.
To summarize, in both the road haulage and the railway sector, the European Commission has set the course for the realization of a Common European policy based on the principles of free access to European transport markets, on the establishment of minimum standards...
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