Mutual recognition as a new mode of governance

Abstract

Mutual recognition is generally not mentioned in debates about new modes of governance, though it is an important alternative to hierarchical steering in the form of harmonization. Next to its broad use in the single market, mutual recognition has been transferred to justice and home affairs, and becomes relevant also beyond the European Union. This article discusses how far mutual recognition meets the criteria of new modes of governance. Comparing mutual recognition to its alternative – harmonization and national treatment – it gives an introductory overview of the characteristics of the principle. Mutual recognition, it is shown, faces significant preconditions as rules to be mutually recognized have to be equivalent; moreover, rules with a high degree of input legitimacy are difficult to transfer. Yet, mutual recognition also offers significant advantages over its alternatives, making it an important topic for governance research.

Keywords:

• Governance
• harmonization
• mutual recognition
• national treatment
• single market
• trade

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The Thyssen Foundation kindly funded a workshop at the University of Bielefeld which allowed discussion of most of the papers which comprise this volume. I would like to thank all participants for their helpful comments, in particular Philipp Genschel, Sandra Lavenex and Kalypso Nicolaïdis. Much of the research for this article was done at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies; I would like to thank Fritz Scharpf in particular. I am also grateful for support under the 6th framework programme of the European Union (Contract No. CIT1-CT-2004-506-392). I would also like to thank Claudia Haase for language corrections in several contributions, and Julia Spreen for her editorial assistance, as well as Tanja Börzel and Jette Knudsen for comments. Last but not least, I am very grateful to Jeremy Richardson for the opportunity to edit this special issue and his support throughout.

Notes

1 Considering this, it might be better to omit the adjective in order to prevent NMG from being believed to be inherently new, which might stand in the way of useful comparisons between different contexts where a certain mode of governance is being deployed – however long it has been used.

2 I thank Wendy van den Nouland for this information.

3 Under certain conditions also a ‘race to the top’ can result. I will come back to this point.

4 In an interesting article Howse and Regan argue that the GATT could also be interpreted as allowing the imposition of process standards on imported products (Howse and Regan 2000).