Festschrift für Fritz W. Scharpf - MPIfG

Héritier · Containing Negative Integration 117
tions, should be excluded from the application of competition and internal
market rules (EP Resolution 2001: 29).
More specifically, the EP recently showed its pro-service public attitude
in its response to the Commission’s policies as expressed in its Communication
of 2000. The Parliament criticizes the lack of a convincing and objective
assessment of the provision of general interest services as proposed
by the Commission, and warns against scaling down services of general interest
to minimal universal services. In a resolution from November 2001, it
also urges the Commission to propose a framework directive which would
legally guarantee that citizens will be provided with services of general interest,
in accordance with Art. 16 of the Amsterdam Treaty. The framework
directive should also spell out objectives and detailed rules of the organization
of services of general interest (www.europarl.eu.int). The EP furthermore
calls upon the Commission to perform “without delay a precise and
comparative evaluation of the real impact of the policy of liberalisation of
services of general interest before embarking upon further liberalisation.
The framework directive should ensure active involvement of citizens and
users in the process of definition, evaluation and contract appraisal and institutionalise
a common pluralist appraisal procedure” (EP Resolution 2001:
7). This procedure should be organized by the EP within various existing forums,
such as the Economic and Social Committee, the Committee of the
Regions, consultative bodies, associations involved in services of general
interest initiatives and consumer associations (EP Resolution 2001: 44). In
addition, the EP welcomes the fact that the Commission wants to draw up a
legal framework for the application of state aid rules to services of general
interest and issue a regulation enabling the exemption of certain services
from the obligation of notification.
As I have shown elsewhere (Héritier 2001a), the EP has played an important
role in introducing service public measures into sectoral liberalization
legislation at the European level in telecoms, electricity and rail services.
In the last case, the role of Parliament was slightly different in that it
pressed for liberalization per se. But this can be accounted for by the fact
that railway liberalization was linked to the hope of giving this mode of
transport a new political impetus vis-à-vis other modes of transport, in particular
air and automobile transport.
Most recently, pressure from below to safeguard general interest services
emerged when postal services, politically a very sensitive public sector,
were liberalized in a ten-year long struggle. While telecom markets were
fully liberalized in 1998, the only liberalization in postal services was a