Europeanized solutions to common problems? The customization of EU food safety law

Time: 
23.11.2015 - 12:00 to 13:30
Location : 
A 5,6 Raum A 231
Type of Event : 
AB B-Kolloquium
Lecturer: 
Dr. Eva Thomann
Lecturer affiliation: 
MZES
Description: 

In the vein of economic modernization and globalization, the production and trade of food have become large-scale, rationalized and embedded in regional or global single markets. Hence, ensuring food safety requires transboundary, cross-sectoral solutions. The European Union (EU) represents an attempt to address this and similarly complex problems with limited resources, intended to achieve far‐reaching economic integration without suppressing legitimate differences in national preferences.

A regulatory policy is only as good as its practical implementation; and multi-level policy implementation always raises questions of discretion and diversity. Europeanization research has extensively studied member state legislative compliance with EU directives. However, EU scholars generally ignore that the transposition of EU policy results in divergent national outcomes, even if member states comply with the EU requirements. Clearly, such differences have far-reaching implications for how EU law helps, for example, to prevent the emergence of antibiotic resistances in livestock.

The presentation will discuss recent efforts to systematically capture the considerable extent of this “legitimate diversity” of policy solutions in the EU analytically and empirically. It looks at fully compliant member states as problem-solvers who “customize” EU rules to their domestic contexts by transcending them in their degree of regulatory density and restrictiveness. Results from EU food safety policy reveal that France, Germany, Austria and the United Kingdom display different customization styles. The presentation elaborates on challenges relating to context-sensitive casing and measurement faced by researchers who wish to analyze customization in a systematic comparative manner. These insights form part of ongoing efforts to code the customization of 56 EU directives in 27 member states in four Policy areas: Internal Market and Services, Justice and Home Affairs, Environment and Social Policy. Cumulative knowledge on such fine-grained Europeanization patterns contributes importantly to a better understanding of the problem-solving capacity of the EU.