Festschrift für Fritz W. Scharpf - MPIfG

116 II · Politik und Demokratie in Europa
Coordination and its benchmarking practices. Consumer associations will
continue to keep an eye on the evaluation and the methods the Commission
proposes to use for it. Thus, the French-initiated association, Réseau Service
Public, had always demanded that the evaluation be public, pluralist, open,
transparent and regularly updated (Nouvelles Europe 2001b: 1).
At the cross-sectoral level, too, mobilization from below in favour of
service public had its origins in France. In the political decision-making
process – as I have shown elsewhere (Héritier 2001a) – the domestic conflict
revolved around the issue of social cohesion, for which public services
played a crucial role. A coalition of diverse national actors forming a proservice
public network (“Réseau Service Public”) spilled over to the European
level in the course of the liberalization process. Although being no
more than a strong minority at this level, France, in coalition with the EP,
which had increased its sway under the codecision rule (Farrell/Héritier
2001), succeeded in getting the Commission to issue its Communication of
1996 in support of general interest services. Simultaneously, the Court rulings
mentioned above, indicating support for the provision of general interest
services supplied by companies set up as legal monopolies, substantiated
the French claims. The general interest discussion was subsequently shifted
to a European sectoral arena, and then even to the IGC. The upshot was that
in the Amsterdam Treaty, general interest services were explicitly stated to
be an objective of European policies (Héritier 2001a).
In this multi-level political process, having the EP as a coalition partner
in launching a service public initiative proved to be crucial. The EP has consistently
proved to be supportive of general interest services. In general
terms, it believes that the policy of liberalizing various services of general
interest may have both positive and negative effects on members of the
public and on users, and that it therefore requires a precise and comparative
evaluation of the quality of services provided before embarking upon further
liberalization (Nouvelles Europe 2001b: 1). In contrast, the Council – and
the Commission – consider liberalization as such to be advantageous to the
provision of general interest services. In general terms, the EP also declares
some areas of social services to be off-limits for competition and free-trade
rules. In its resolution of November 2001, the EP underlines that services
relating to national education, public health and compulsory basic social security
schemes, activities that are a matter of government – such as air traffic
control or prevention of pollution at sea – as well as services provided by
non-profit organizations, in particular social, charitable and cultural institu-