Festschrift für Fritz W. Scharpf - MPIfG

V. Schmidt · The Boundaries of “Bounded Generalizations” 345
try. As such, at the same time that national leaders mostly speak positively
about European integration in their very different communicative discourses
on the EU, they also may use the EU to push through policies which they
would not otherwise have been able. This has been especially the case with
regard to the budgetary discipline related to monetary integration for a
number of countries, in particular Italy, which used the EU in the discourse
as the “vincolo esterno,” or compelling external constraint, to overcome resistance
to reform (Featherstone 2001). But the use of the EU in the discourse
has also served to overcome resistance in a number of public service
sectors – in France with regard to telecommunications (Thatcher 2000),
Germany for electricity (Eising/Jabko 2002), and Britain and Germany for
rail transport (Héritier et al. 2001).
But although in many cases reform has been facilitated by this blameshifting
approach, it can backfire if the public begins to perceive the EU as
bringing unwelcome change – as has already been the case in Denmark in
the 2001 referendum on the euro or Ireland with regard to the referendum on
the Treaty of Nice. Moreover, where political leaders do not clearly communicate
to the public the changes in decision-making authority and responsibility
related to the EU, either because they pass over them in silence (as
in France) or highlight only their negative effects (in Britain especially under
Thatcher and Major), they again risk democratic legitimacy – in France
by appearing to be responsible for decisions over which they no longer have
control, in Britain by making any changes related to further European integration
appear illegitimate and any government that therefore moves toward
greater integration responsible for undermining British democracy (Schmidt
2002c).
3 Conclusion
Discourse, in short, is the missing factor in actor-centered institutionalism,
with discursive institutional interactions often able to explain policy change
in cases where strategic institutional interactions cannot. At the national
level, ideas and discourse are often the key to explaining why change occurred
at a given time in a given country and not at another time or in another
country when all other factors remained constant. At the EU level, it
also helps lend insight into how significant institutional constraints to
change were overcome. For EU multi-level decision-making in particular,