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

该项目调查了最近有关欧盟电信治理改革的谈判，以检验对欧盟制度变化的创新内生解释。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其行使的方法。因此，它们越来越多地求助于由本国决策专家组成的跨国网络，将其政策提交审查，以此作为使政策创新和交流/效仿最佳做法系统化的一种手段，但没有任何程度的协调，而只是通过专家同行审查、监测和评估来进行更宽松的纪律处分。对这一“新治理”趋势的正统解释将其归因于各国政府的偏好，但该项目反问，这种治理模式所依赖的专家网络是否实际上可能解释了它的形成。将专家网络对政策制定的充分有据可查的影响力视为理所当然，该项目考虑是否可能将其扩展到它们施加影响的过程的设计，在这种情况下，它们可能会在我们与其关联的那些过程中增强某些特征：围绕共同的专业观点组织，而不是国家从属关系，它们更喜欢在“狭隘的”国家政治之上运作，在合作中，技术官僚和跨国背景。他们的理性主义取向与欧盟以结果为基础的合法性取向产生了共鸣，而他们对实验、同行审查和建立共识的信念与欧盟的新治理模式产生了共鸣，尽管不是更自上而下的、协调的模式。在这一点上，不那么正式(但仍然是跨国的)专业社区预先存在于他们正式进入新治理的网络中，游说团体被纳入这个机构的圈子，从那里他们有强大的地位来推动更多的相同。因此，一旦建立了新的治理轨迹，它就是依赖于路径的；它与其专家网络的纠缠/共生关系使两者能够自我加强。在夺回权力方面，他们的专业知识比其他人更有能力找到理由扩大自己的权力，他们的专业知识将他们从多面手的政治主人手中解放出来--他们轻而易举地摆脱了国家政治结构的束缚，同时避免被吸收到欧盟自身的结构中，从而在缺乏同等制衡的层面之间开辟了一个跨国治理空间。围绕欧盟电信新监管框架的曲折谈判(2006-2010年)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相关的那些方面，而只是对制度架构进行改革，更具体地说是：(1)新欧盟监管机构的设计，归根结底是各国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本国电信市场竞争问题而设计的补救措施的权力范围，归根结底是它是否应该能够否决和/或协调这些问题。这些问题的意义在于，选择落在项目调查的断层线的两边。用两个词表示，它们将传统的欧盟决策与新治理对立；将集中化的执行/协调与分散的流程和地方自由裁量权对立；将一个欧盟机构与网络模式对立。我们对关键参与者的偏好和谈判立场以及谈判结果有所了解，但需要研究各国监管机构网络在实现这一点方面的影响。

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.