Research Papers

For the last fifty years, integration theories have aimed to explain how and why member states come together, thus neglecting to pay attention to and account for how and why EU countries continue to remain different. This question is partially addressed by the literature on transposition but those analyses focus exclusively on unilateral actions at the national level. In contrast, this paper explores the extent to which the EU itself tolerates and accommodates national diversity. Does the EU exert stronger homogenizing pressures in given sectors over time or do EU policies increasingly allow for greater leeway at the national level? Relying on textual analysis of legislation, other official documents and unstructured elite interviews, the paper presents empirical evidence establishing a puzzling variation in the direction of change in accommodation across three largely similar issue areas, all pertaining to the regulation of the internal market and subject to the same decision rules. Successive reforms have removed important flexibility for national administration in food safety regulation. In the field of protection of consumer economic interests, the level of accommodation has remained relatively constant. Finally, a new type of accommodating mechanism is being introduced in the latest reform of the regulation of genetically modified organisms. The paper identifies the level of contestation and type of involvement as two factors that can account for this variation.