Festschrift für Fritz W. Scharpf - MPIfG

Containing Negative Integration
Adrienne Héritier
1 Introduction
In his book “Governing in Europe – Effective and Democratic?” (1999)
Fritz Scharpf analyzes the dynamic that gives European policies a bias in
favour of competition and free trade at the cost of market-correcting or redistributive
policies. He argues that the Commission decisions and directives
and the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) seeking to
establish competition and free trade are based on relatively easy decisionmaking
processes – relatively easy because they imply low decision-making
costs. By comparison, the realization of market-correcting policies involves
high decision-making costs, because a consensus needs to be found in the
Council of Ministers, and a majority in the European Parliament (EP) has to
support it. In other words, while the Commission and ECJ motors turn
smoothly as they deepen negative integration, 1 a lot of political support
needs to be mustered up in the Council and the EP to bring about positive
integration and redistributive policies. The argument appears intriguing and
convincing and can be substantiated with much empirical evidence from
various areas of European policy-making over the last twenty years. How-
1 “Negative integration refers to the removal of tariffs, quantitative restrictions, and other
barriers to trade or obstacles to free and undistorted competition. Positive integration, by
contrast, refers to the reconstruction of a system of economic regulation at the level of the
larger economic unit. The distinction is not completely synonymous with a second one
between ‘market-making’ and ‘market-correcting’ policy interventions. While all measures
of negative integration should probably be classified as being market making, measures
of positive integration may be either market making (e.g. divergent national product
standards are being ‘harmonized’ in order to eliminate existing non-tariff barriers to trade)
or market correcting (e.g. process-oriented regulations of working conditions or pollution
control)” (Scharpf 1999: 45).