Making Europe in their Image: Communities of expertise and the shaping of transnational governance

该项目调查了最近关于欧盟电信治理改革的谈判，以测试欧盟制度变革的创新内生账户。鉴于公众对直接向欧盟转移政策的敏感性，欧洲国家倾向于保留这些权力，同时在提出复杂的跨国问题时寻求协调行使这些权力的方法。因此，它们越来越多地求助于由本国政策制定专家组成的跨国网络，它们将自己的政策提交给这些网络进行审查，作为政策创新的系统化和最佳实践的交流/模仿的一种手段，但没有任何程度的协调，而只是通过专家同行审查、监测和评估进行较软的约束。对这种“新治理”趋势的正统解释将其归因于国家政府的偏好，但该项目推翻了这一观点，询问这种治理模式所依赖的专家网络是否实际上可以解释其（转变）。考虑到专家网络对政策制定的充分影响是理所当然的，该项目考虑是否可以扩展到他们施加这种影响的过程的设计，在这种情况下，他们可能会在与他们相关的过程中增加某些特征：他们围绕着共同的职业前景而不是国家关系组织起来，他们更喜欢在合作、技术官僚和跨国环境中超越“狭隘的”国家政治。他们的理性主义取向与欧盟的结果合法性取向产生共鸣，而他们对实验、同行评审和建立共识的信仰与欧盟的新治理模式产生共鸣，尽管不是自上而下的协调模式。因此，在正式进入新治理网络之前，不太正式（但仍然是跨国的）的专业知识社区就在游说，希望被纳入这个机构的范畴，从那里他们有强大的优势，可以推动更多相同的东西。因此，新治理轨迹一旦建立，就依赖于路径；它与专家网络的纠缠/共生关系使两者自我强化。他们比其他人更有能力创造理由来扩大自己的权力，他们的专业知识使他们从通才的政治主人手中解放出来，他们可以很容易地从国家政治结构中脱身，同时避免被欧盟自己的结构所吸收，从而在各级之间开辟出一个跨国治理空间，缺乏对他们的同等制衡。关于欧盟电信新监管框架（2006-2010）的曲折谈判为检验这一理论提供了一个理想的实验室。该项目不涉及与实质性电信监管有关的那些方面，而只是改革制度架构，更具体地说：(1)新的欧盟监管机构的设计，这归结为国家监管机构网络或中央机构之间的选择；(2)欧盟委员会对各国监管机构为解决电信市场竞争问题而制定的补救措施的权力程度，这归结为欧盟委员会是否应该有权否决和/或协调这些措施。这些问题的重要性在于，选择落在项目调查的断层线的两侧。用二元语言来表达，他们将传统的欧盟决策与新治理对立起来；集中实施/协调以对抗分散的程序和地方裁量权；欧盟机构反对网络模式。我们对主要参与者的偏好和谈判立场以及谈判结果有所了解，但需要研究国家监管机构网络在达到这一点方面的影响。

The project investigates recent negotiations over reform to the governance of telecoms in the EU to test an innovative endogenous account of EU institutional change. Given public sensitivity towards straight policy transfers to the EU, European states tend to hold onto these powers while seeking ways to coordinate their exercise when they raise complex, transnational issues. Increasingly they turn therefore to transnational networks made up of their own national policymaking experts, to which they submit their policy for scrutiny, as a means of systematising policy innovation and the exchange/emulation of best practice, but without any degree of harmonisation, but only a softer disciplining via expert peer review, monitoring and evaluation. The orthodox explanation for this 'New Governance' trend attributes it to the preferences of national governments, but the project reverses this to ask whether the very expert networks upon which this mode of governance depends might in fact account for its (trans)formation.Taking expert networks' well-documented influence over policymaking for granted, the project considers whether it might extend to the design of the processes through which they exert that influence, in which case they are likely to ramp up certain characteristics in those processes that we associate with them: Organised around a common professional outlook, rather than national affiliation, they prefer to operate above 'parochial' national politics, in cooperative, technocratic and transnational settings. Their rationalist orientation resonates with the EU's legitimacy-by-results orientation, while their faith in experimentation, peer-review, and consensus-building resonates with its New Governance mode, though not its more top-down, harmonizing modes.On this account, less formalised (but nonetheless transnational) communities of expertise that pre-exist their formal induction into New Governance's networks, lobby to be taken into this institutional fold, from where they are powerfully positioned to push for more of the same. Once established, a New Governance trajectory is therefore path-dependent; its entangled/symbiotic relationship with its expert networks making the two self-reinforcing. Better able to generate reasons to grow their power than others are at wresting it back, their specialist expertise emancipates them from their generalist political masters, who they easily out-manoeuvre to pull away from national political structures, while avoiding absorption into the EU's own structures, thus carving out a transnational governance space between the levels that lacks equivalent checks upon them.The tortuous negotiations over the EU's new regulatory framework for telecoms (2006-2010) present an ideal laboratory for testing this theory. The project does not concern those aspects relating to substantive telecoms regulation, but only to reform to the institutional architecture and, more specifically: (1) the design of the new EU regulator, which boiled down to a choice between a network of national regulators or a centralised agency; and (2) the extent of the European Commission's powers over remedies designed by national regulators to solve competition problems on their telecoms markets, which boiled down to whether it should be able to veto and/or harmonise them. The significance of these issues is that the choices fall either side of the fault-line that the project investigates. Expressed in binary terms, they pitch traditional EU decision-making against New Governance; centralised implementation/harmonisation against decentralised processes and local discretion; and an EU agency against a networked model. We know something of the preferences and negotiating positions of the key actors and the outcomes of the negotiations, but need to research the influence of the network of national regulators in getting to this point.