How Europe hits home: evidence from the Swiss case

Abstract

This article contributes to the debate on the domestic consequences of European integration by focusing on three aspects often neglected in the literature. First, while most works deal with the policy dimension of Europeanization, we develop a set of research hypotheses on its polity and politics implications. Its consequences on the institutions of the decision-making process, on élite conflictuality and on domestic power configuration are examined. Secondly, close attention is paid to the transmission mechanisms at work by comparing the effects of ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ Europeanization to a control case where European influences are only minimal. Thirdly, we provide empirical evidence from a non-EU member country (Switzerland), a type of state for which the consequences of Europeanization are still little explored. Based on a quantitative network analysis, our empirical tests reveal some important differences in the effects of direct and indirect Europeanization.

Keywords:

• Comparative case studies
• decision-making process
• Europeanization
• network analysis
• power configuration
• Switzerland

Acknowledgments

This article is part of the research project ‘The Swiss Decision-Making System in the Era of Globalization’ directed by Pascal Sciarini. We acknowledge the financial support of the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant no 5004- 058512).

Notes

While the Europeanization literature is recent, it shares some similarities with the ‘second-image reversed’ approach in international relations (e.g. Almond 1989; Gourevitch 1978; Katzenstein 1984, 1985).

There are, however, some exceptions (see Anderson 2002; Häusermann et al. 2002b; Ladrech 1994; Moravcsik 1998; Sciarini et al. 2002; Fischer 2003b).

EEA countries have to adapt their national policies according to the EEA rules adopted by the EU; they have a say in the initial phases of a decision-making process (‘decision-shaping’) but cannot vote on the adoption of a bill (‘decision- making’).

There is an extensive literature on the impact of EU membership on Switzerland’s three institutional cornerstones: direct democracy, federalism and neutrality (for a summary of this literature, see Kriesi 1998). By contrast, the study of the consequences of Europeanization for the ‘soft’ institutions of decision-making processes has been neglected thus far.

In Switzerland, all federal laws adopted by the Swiss Parliament are submitted to the facultative referendum: by collecting 50,000 signatures of citizens in 100 days against a law, a group may call for a final decision by the people.

A commission of experts, ‘as its name does not indicate, comprises not only specialists in the field but also representatives of interest groups, of the cantons and the parties’ (Morand 1987: 76; our translation).

A consultation procedure is launched either by the Federal Council or by a department of the administration. It usually consists of a written consultation in which all the main political parties, interested organizations, and the cantons, are invited to express their opinions with respect to a legislative project. The analysis of the results of the consultation procedure, undertaken by the appropriate department, paves the way for the final draft of the legislative act, which is then adopted by the Federal Council (the Swiss government) and transmitted to the Swiss Parliament.

This hypothesis is in line with Kriesi’s (1980: 611–12) finding that the consultative procedures implemented during the negotiation between Switzerland and the European Community (EC) on the free trade agreement in 1971 were highly informal and included a limited number of participants.

For instance, the Swiss Business Federation (economiesuisse) is the only Swiss peak association that is directly represented in Brussels.

According to experts’ responses to a survey on the 210 legislative acts adopted by the Swiss Parliament during the 1995–99 legislative period, social policy issues appear as the legislative acts with the lowest level of ‘internationalization’ (Sciarini et al. 2002: 13).

Access to the Swiss labour market has always been an important concern for southern EU countries.

The interview breakdown is as follows: 53 persons for the case of the free movement of persons, 63 for the telecommunication reform and 38 for the eleventh pension reform. See Appendix 1 for a detailed list of the organizations interviewed in the study.

The positional approach selects the actors according to the position they hold in the political system, the decisional approach identifies the participants in the decision-making process, and the reputational approach includes the actors according to the influence they are perceived to have.

To that end we use the software UCINET (5.0) and STRUCTURE (2.0).

This phase includes, for instance, the negotiations with the EU at the international level, or the preparation of the ‘message’ on a given project that the Federal Council will then submit to the Parliament.

These procedures were offered to non-state actors by the federal administration as part of the latter’s strategy to open the network and to build stronger support for the bilateral treaties in the ratification phase (Fischer et al. 2002; see also below).

Note that in the field of social policy formal pre-parliamentary consultation procedures are still important but, presumably, much less important than they were in the early 1970s (Häusermann et al. 2002a).

The question asked encompasses the various phases of the decision-making process more generally. It was labelled as follows: ‘Here is a list of the main phases of the decision-making process on the free movement of persons. Could you tell me in which phases your organization participated?’ We focus here on the responses regarding the administrative phase.

The question was the following: ‘With regard to the elaboration of this act, could you tell me with which organizations you had great divergence of views, respectively great convergence of views?’ The answers were coded in the following way: –1 for divergence, +1 for convergence and 0 for neither/nor.

The average level of conflict is computed by adding the scores (–1, 0 or 1) of the convergence/divergence matrix. The resulting figure is then divided by the overall number of possible links.

They were joined only by the Christian-Democratic party, a key player in Parliament giving its pivotal position in building or destroying majorities.

A second important argument for the left was the general perception that the public operator PTT Telecom needed access to the European market in order to survive economically (Pravato 1998).

In order to prevent Switzerland from cherry-picking, the EU linked the agreement on the free movement of persons with the six other bilateral treaties. Given that most of them improved access to the single market for the Swiss export industry, the latter strongly supported the acceptance of the whole package.

The question was as follows: ‘In your opinion, which are the three most important actors in the decision-making process on …?’ The rationale behind such a question is that the major actors of the network are the best experts to evaluate the importance of the actors (or phases, see above) of a decision-making process.

The question was as follows: ‘Here is a list of actors in this decision-making process. Based on this list, could you please tell me with whom you collaborated closely?’

Technically, the betweenness centrality of an actor measures the percentage of actors that must transit through a specific actor in order to reach (i.e. to collaborate with) the other actors in the network.

Note that this result does not contradict that of the previous section where we found that state actors rely greatly on informal consultations of non-state actors. A more detailed analysis not presented here reveals that, although reinforced, state actors adopted an ‘inclusive’ strategy in order to build stronger support for the agreement in the ratification phase (Fischer et al. 2002).

Note that in the telecommunication reform two other domestic actors, namely economiesuisse and the PTT, were also highly central in the network. At that time the PTT (and the federal railways) did still fully belong to the state. If we count the latter as state actors, the degree of centrality of state actors comes close to that in the pension reform.

During our interviews, some MPs mentioned that the new procedures adopted in 1992 certainly improved their level of information but not their ability to influence the policy line adopted by the Swiss Federal Council.

In doing so, we took into account the fact that not all members of peak organizations are export-oriented. Thus, we did not include in our sum the scores of economic organizations of the construction sector, which are mostly active in the domestic sector of the economy (Fischer 2002).

According to Table 4, labour even clearly dominates over capital. Remember, however, that this table does not include the associations of the domestic economy, which are very important in the social policy field. Therefore, Table 4 certainly underestimates the strength of capital in this case.