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Has the European Semester led to a displacement of Social Europe, or to the development of social policy through fiscal processes and actors? – Potential for Semester to increase soft law’s binding effects or ‘socialise’ EU policy-making – Positive effects severely limited by the Semester’s overall goals: fiscal stabilisation and the creation of increasingly uniform economic policies – Dilemma for Social Europe: how can an autonomous EU social policy be (re) established without risking marginalisation?
This article revisits the balancing act between independence and accountability at the European Central Bank (ECB). It contrasts procedural and substantive concepts of accountability, and challenges the mainstream idea that independence and accountability can be reconciled through narrow mandates, the indiscriminate increase of transparency, the creation of multiple channels of accountability, and the active use of judicial review. These assumptions form the pillars of a procedural type of accountability that promises to resolve the independence/accountability dilemma but fails to do so in practice. The article brings evidence to show how ECB accountability has become a complex administrative exercise that focuses on the procedural steps leading up to monetary and supervisory decisions while simultaneously limiting substantive accountability. The failure to acknowledge the trade‐off between independence and accountability (said to be ‘two sides of the same coin’) has resulted in a tendency to privilege the former over the latter.
The article examines the implementation of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) in the European Union via National Action Plans (NAPs). We argue that some of the shortcomings currently observed in the implementation process could effectively be addressed through the Open Method of Coordination (OMC) – a governance instrument already used by the European Union (EU) in other policy domains. The article sketches out the polycentric global governance approach envisaged by the UNGPs and discusses the institutional and policy background of their implementation in the EU. It provides an assessment of EU member states’ NAPs on business and human rights, as benchmarked against international NAP guidance, before relating experiences with the existing NAP process to the policy background and rationale of the OMC and considering the conditions for employing the OMC in the business and human rights domain. Building on a recent opinion of the EU Fundamental Rights Agency, the article concludes with a concrete proposal for developing an OMC on business and human rights in the EU.
The flurry of recent activity in the EU over “Better Regulation” has important constitutional implications, particularly for the Union’s institutional balance. As this article will argue, however, the main question the Better Regulation debate poses is one of how to reconcile the increasing tension in the EU between different paradigms of regulation. Is regulation “better” because it conforms to the preferences of citizens as expressed in national and EU elections, or rather because it meets technical and procedural standards, from consultation to impact assessment, able to improve the “objective” quality of EU legislation? While Better Regulation tries to split the difference between these two avenues for the future of EU regulatory law and politics, each avenue carries the capacity to significantly frustrate the other. Current debates in the EU about regulatory reform defer rather than answer a fundamental question: what makes regulation better?
The ‘political Commission’ may be the defining idea of the Juncker Presidency. But did it work? This paper is devoted to analysing how the notion of a political Commission has framed the organization and policy-making of the Juncker Commission. The idea of the political Commission was to allow the Commission to streamline its agenda and focus on a narrower number of proposals. In the words of the 2018 State of the Union address: to be ‘bigger on the big things and smaller on the small things’. In reality, external constraints, and in particular the divergent preferences and electoral cycles of national governments, have frustrated this promise. The Commission’s confinement to a relatively narrow set of regulatory (rather than distributive) tools limits its ability to be politically responsive to the main challenges the Union currently faces. At the same time, the political Commission undermines some elements of the Commission’s regulatory legitimacy – for example, its promise to be a neutral arbiter in the enforcement of competition, internal market and rule of law norms. While the political Commission continues to be a normatively attractive idea, it has fitted poorly with the institutional and political constraints surrounding the Juncker Presidency. This carries implications for the next Commission and
the fate of the Spitzenkandidaten process.