Symposium:
Mountain or Molehill?
A Critical Appraisal of the Commission White Paper on Governance

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European Governance: Common Concerns vs. The Challenge of Diversity ^*

Fritz W. Scharpf ^**

This paper is a part of contributions to the Jean Monnet Working Paper
No.6/01, Symposium: Mountain or Molehill? A Critical Appraisal of the Commission White Paper on Governance

• 1. The Emphasis
• 2. The Omissions
• 3. The Asymmetric Political Economy of European Integration
• 4. The Narrow Constraints of European Governance by Majority Rule
• 5. The Heroic Commission
• 6. Multilevel Europe: Constraining and Enabling
  • 6.1 Closer co-operation
  • 6.2 Open co-ordination

The Commission's White Paper on European Governance is as remarkable for what it says as for what it does not say. In combination, the emphases and the omissions seem to reflect a vision that is defined by both the institutional self-interest of the Commission and its opposition to Member States, and, at the same time, by a remarkable lack of concern about the real challenges confronting the Union and its Member States. I realize that this may appear to be an unfair judgment since the authors of the White Paper sought to avoid the issues that require amendments of the Treaty which might come on the agenda of the next Intergovernmental Conference (or Constitutional Convention). But even if the recommendations were to be limited to changes permissible under the Treaty, they could still have been developed in the context of an unconstrained analysis of the challenges that the Union has to face.

^* Helpful suggestions by Gerda Falkner are gratefully acknowledged.

^** Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne, August 16, 2001

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© Fritz W. Scharpf 2001