"The Commission and national governments as partners: EC regulatory expansion in telecommunications 1979-2000"

Thatcher, Mark. (2001) "The Commission and national governments as partners: EC regulatory expansion in telecommunications 1979-2000". In: UNSPECIFIED, Madison, Wisconsin. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

General integrationist models underline conflicts between the Commission and national governments. They cite telecommunications as an exemplar of the Commission imposing its choices on unwilling member states. However, a close examination of the development of substantive EC regulation in telecommunications shows that the Commission and national governments acted in partnership. Major conflicts concerned constitutional issues rather than substantive ones. How and why the partnership came to exist is analyzed using a principalagent framework. The paper argues that formal and informal institutional controls made the Commission very sensitive to the preferences of national governments in substantive EC telecommunications regulation. Four processes of decision making whereby both formal controls and less formal institutions (norms) operated to prevent agency losses for governments are found: the participation of national governments at all stages of decision making; incrementalism; compromises and linkages; national discretion in implementation. Effective controls resulted, through these processes, in partnership between the Commission and national governments in developing substantive EC regulation.

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