The End of Creeping Competence? EU Policy-Making Since Maastricht

• Published in: Journal of common market studies Vol. 38; no. 3; pp. 519 - 538
• Main Author: Pollack, Mark A.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford, UK and Boston, USA Blackwell Publishers Ltd 01-09-2000; Wiley Blackwell; Blackwell; Blackwell Publishing Ltd
• Series: Journal of Common Market Studies
• Subjects: Economic and Monetary Union; EU enlargement; European integration; European Monetary Union; European policy; History; Maastricht Treaty; Policy making; Politics; Studies; Subsidiarity; Europe
• ISSN: 0021-9886; 1468-5965
• DOI: 10.1111/1468-5965.00233

From its origins in the Treaty of Rome to the Maastricht Treaty on European Union, the EU has expanded the range of its activities dramatically, adopting both budgetary and regulatory policies across a broad range of issue‐areas. The 1990s, however, witnessed a political and economic backlash against the creeping centralization of policy‐making in Brussels, threatening a major retrenchment, or even devolution, of EU policy‐making. This article examines budgetary and regulatory data from the late 1990s and early 2000s, to determine whether the centralization of policy‐making has slowed, or even reversed, during the post‐Maastricht era. The data reveal selective evidence of retrenchment in EU budgetary expenditures, which have been limited by the fiscal restrictions of EMU, German resistance to any increase in its net contribution, and the new budgetary demands of enlargement. By contrast, data on EU regulation suggest that the EU has been, and remains, an active regulator across a wide range of issue‐areas after Maastricht, and will continue to play the role of a regulatory state in the future.