States and Regions in the European Union: Institutional Adaptation in Germany and Spain
- PDF / 69,910 Bytes
- 4 Pages / 442 x 663 pts Page_size
- 55 Downloads / 164 Views
he thorough and counterintuitive examination of the impact of Europeanization on German cooperative federalism and Spanish competitive regionalism places Tanja Bo¨rzel’s study of the States and Regions in the European Union directly among the most cutting-edge literature on European integration. In the past decade, research on the impact of European decisions on the various domestic domains of nation-states has evolved rapidly as the European integration process has reached an all-time high. It is within scholarly consensus that we should expect to find important variations in the way European integration is appropriated in different members’ domestic political practices and discourses. Bo¨rzel employs a controlled comparison of two decentralized European Union (EU) member-states, Germany and Spain. The author effectively demonstrates that both Germany and Spain are over time internalizing the impact of the European framework and adjusting their domestic decision-making processes and institutional structures. While in Germany, Europeanization has resulted in flexible adjustment and ultimately in the reinforcement of existing territorial institutions, in the Spanish system of intergovernmental relations it has been an impetus for profound institutional change. Bo¨rzel’s observation leads her to ask questions that ultimately lie at the core of the contribution her volume makes to the existing literature. How can we explain such variations and how do we account for them? More generally, how does Europeanization interact with national institutions, and are we likely to see some convergence among the memberstates, or will institutional differences prevail? The German La¨nder have cooperated with the federal government in formulating and representing the German bargaining position, while Spanish competitive regionalism has been characterized by distrust and conflict, and consequently the Comuninades Auto´nomas have competed with and attempted to bypass the Spanish government in European policy-making. Nonetheless, despite the different strategies of the two types of regions, the institutional adaptation has ultimately reached a similar outcome in both Germany and Spain: the acceptance of a framework of cooperation with the central state. Journal of International Relations and Development, 2004, 7, (456–459) r 2004 Palgrave Macmillan Ltd 1408-6980/04 $30.00
www.palgrave-journals.com/jird
Book Review
457
Specifically, Bo¨rzel advocates the use of resource dependency in an institutionalist approach to Europeanization in order to explain when and how Europe affects the institutions of its member-states. Within such an approach, the European Union can be conceived of as a political opportunity structure (Marks and McAdam 1996) that differently endowed actors can take advantage of to different degrees. At the same time, domestic institutions in a member-state influence the extent to which Europeanization changes the distribution of resources among domestic actors, while they also have an effect on the way in which domestic
Data Loading...
