The Member States Slides to support Chapter 15 of The Government and Politics of the European Union, 7th ed., by Neill Nugent

The Context The EU is structured and organised in such a way as to ensure that all member states can have confidence in the nature of the system The institutional architecture The balance of policy competences Ability to be involved at most policy-making stages Control mechanisms exercised by governments Ensuring appropriate EU-level implementation procedures are in place – to avoid ‘free riders’ and poor implementers The ‘compromise spirit’ of (most) inter-state relations

The Nature of relations Between EU Member States Differences between member states are cross-cutting rather than cumulative. There is a flexible internal alliance system. The shifting nature of coalitions, allied with the preference for consensual decision-making in the Council, means no state is continually excluded and there are ‘prizes for everyone’. The positions of states on particular issues is not necessarily fixed, but can change following national elections.

Key Issues Dividing Member States The issues include: The ‘end goal’ How should decisions in the EU be made? How liberal (non interventionist) should EU economic policies be? What should be the size of the EU’s budget? Where should the spending priorities be? How independent should EU foreign and defence policies be of the Atlantic Alliance?

EU-Member State Relations These can be viewed in two ways: ‘bottom up’ – how member state input into the EU ‘top down’ – how the EU impacts on the member states These have combined to bring about a considerable ‘Europeanisation’ in all M/S: a term used mainly to encapsulate the changes emanating from the impact of the Union at the domestic level.

‘Bottom-up’ Relations: Inputting into EU Processes: 1 Member states have many opportunities to feed into all policy process stages: agenda-setting formulation decision-negotiating and taking implementation

‘Bottom-up’ Relations: Inputting into EU Processes: 2 Much of the debate and literature on this issue comes close to equating member states with national governments. This is clearly over-simplistic in many ways: the plurality of multi-level, institutional, and sectional interests in member states the numerous opportunity structures for non governmental actors provided by the EU the differences that often exist between national actors on EU issues But, governments are clearly ‘privileged’

Factors Determining Member State Influence Key factors include: political weight economic weight methods of operation credibility and consistency But influence also varies according to issues - compare, for example, agriculture and fishing.

Top Down Influence ‘Europeanization’ Impact on institutions • Impact on policy processes • Impact on policies • Impact on political parties • Impact on subnational levels of government