Festschrift für Fritz W. Scharpf - MPIfG

344 V · Erklärung und Verallgemeinerung
But while the EU multi-actor, multi-level discourse is highly elaborate and
complicated, given the two levels (or even three levels in the case of regional
policy) of discursive interaction, the EU level communicative discourse
is very thin – even thinner than that of national multi-actor systems.
This stems in part from the fact that, much as in national multi-actor systems,
the EU Commission is unlikely to do much more than announce the
agreements that emerge from the Council of Ministers for fear of unraveling
the compromises made in private by the key national political actors functioning
in their supranational policy capacity. But the thinness of the EU
level communicative discourse is also related to the fact that the EU has no
single authoritative voice which can speak for the whole at the EU level, 9
while national leaders are the primary interlocutors for the EU to the coun-
9 Whether this is a function of personality or institution is another question.