Festschrift für Fritz W. Scharpf - MPIfG

322 V · Erklärung und Verallgemeinerung
from the supranational governance structures and processes that may undermine
national governance structures and processes (Schmidt 1999a, 1999b).
1.2 Policy Legacies
The second background factor encompasses the policy legacies which ensure
that some problems represent major challenges for some countries but
not for others. This is largely a question of fit, depending upon whether the
policies and policymaking institutions in place are adequate to respond to
the challenge, or not (Scharpf 2000b). 2 For example, the economic vulnerability
related to the second oil crisis represented a much greater challenge
for countries that had followed soft money policies (neo-Keynesian pumppriming)
in response to the first oil crisis than for countries that had already
switched to hard money policies (monetarism) at that time, such as Germany
(Scharpf 2000a). Similarly, the increasing international competition
that has eroded employment in the exposed sectors of national economies
has been more of a challenge to countries with policy legacies that made it
harder for them to create jobs in the sheltered sectors. In most Continental
welfare states, the challenge was particularly great. The male-breadwinner
model in which pensions depend upon a reasonably high wage, full-time
employment over a lifetime ensured against the lower-paying, part-time and
temporary private sector jobs that fit with Anglo-Saxon welfare states’ policy
legacies, while the traditional low level of state provision of services
also ensured against the higher-paying public service jobs that fit the Scandinavian
welfare states’ policy legacies (Scharpf 2000a).
Moreover, among the problems for the polity resulting from the spillovers
from policy solutions, the policies linked to European monetary integration
(from European Monetary System through European Monetary Union)
represented less of a challenge for Germany, since they fit with its policy
legacies of monetary stability and inflation fighting by an independent
bank, than, say, for France, Italy, or Sweden, with policy legacies of dependent
central banks and inflation-spurred growth which would have to be reversed.
Similarly, the EU’s quasi-federal governance structures generally
represent less of a political institutional challenge to federal Germany than
2 For the question of “fit” with regard to the challenge respresented by EU policies, see Börzel/Risse
(2000), Cowles/Caporaso/Risse (2001), Héritier et al. (2001), Schmidt (2001b).