Festschrift für Fritz W. Scharpf - MPIfG

342 V · Erklärung und Verallgemeinerung
agreement, however, may be entirely cooperative and “solidaristic,” as has
been typical in Austria (Heinisch l999) or, rather, may involve more “antagonistic
cooperation” with verbal conflict and public posturing preliminary
to arriving at a compromise consensus behind closed doors, as has been
more typical of Germany (Scharpf l991: 117; Lehmbruch l978). Only in election
periods may the coordinative discourse lose its contractual tone and cooperative
tenor. This is because the communicative discourse generally
comes to the fore, working at cross-purposes with the coordinative discourse,
since the adversarial public pronouncements of political actors in the
heat of the election campaign are likely to hinder cooperation in the coordinative
discussions behind closed doors among government coalition partners,
with the opposition, and with societal interests closely allied with one
or another of the battling political parties – as was the case in Germany in the
year running up to the September l998 federal elections for the Bundestag.
At critical moments, however, when the coordinative discourse breaks
down, political actors can use the communicative discourse in a more positive
manner, by providing a new frame within which policy actors can reconstruct
the coordinative discourse while persuading the public and the
most affected interests of a better course of action. For example, the Italian
government’s communicative discourse with regard to pension reform in
1995 helped reframe the coordinative discourse among social partners (Baccaro
2000). But the German Social-Democratic government’s communicative
discourse in the late 1990s shows how hard it is to come up with such a
new frame, for all the trying through borrowings from the British third-way
and the French socialist discourses (Schmidt 2000b).
Whatever the problems of single and multi-actor systems with regard to
the discourse, these are only compounded when the EU level of discursive
interaction is also involved, especially given the differential impact of the
EU on national single actor vs. multi-actor systems.
2.2.3 Discursive Interactions in the EU’s Multi-Actor Supranational
Governance System
The European Union can best be seen as a supranational, multi-actor system
that shares many characteristics – but certainly not all – with national multiactor
systems in terms of its discursive institutional interactions. The complex
joint decision-making system made up of Commission-organized discussions
among experts, interest groups, governmental representatives, lobbyists,
and the like (comitology), together with deliberations in the Council