"Emerging influences on the evolution of the European regulatory system"

Wallace, Helen. (1997) "Emerging influences on the evolution of the European regulatory system". In: UNSPECIFIED, Seattle, WA. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

This paper argues that several factors of change are evident which might well alter in important ways the contours of the west European regulatory system that has grown up in the European Union over the past decade: 1) the intrusion of citizens’ resistance to certain kinds of European regulation; 2) the imbalance in the European integration process between forces of economic integration and forces of social differentiation; 3) the need to accommodate the accession of central and eastern Europe within the single market; 4) possible changes in the prevailing political constellation (ideas of governing elites); and 5) a contestation of the orthodox Community method and institutional framework for devising and implementing European legislation. These factors individually and all in combination, may limit the relative autonomy of the regulatory system that was kick-started by the 1992 programme. The regulatory process is likely to become more prone to influences from the political and the social domains, as well as susceptible to more active external influences (both EU enlargement and WTO developments). The probability is then that a less insulated regulatory process will become more variegated, more uneven and less predictable in its content and impacts.

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