Authors Iain Begg | Gabriel Glöckler | Anke Hassel ... - The Europaeum

the EU is treated by the VoC as an important but essentially exogenous
factor, akin to the impact of globalisation on national trade-offs. For this
reason, the internal machinations of EU policymaking are of second order
importance for most VoC scholars.
Fioretes makes a rare attempt to explain the formation of EU policies
through the VoC lens. 10 Using the negotiation of the Maastricht Treaty as
a case study, he argues that national preference formation, under EMU
can be linked, in many cases, to the underlying model of capitalism.
Specifically, he views the UK’s opposition to the Social Charter as an
attempt to protect the institutions of a liberal market economy. Likewise,
Germany’s reticence towards financial market deregulation is explained
by a desire to preserve its “patient” model of corporate finance.
This line of reasoning might help to explain some of the Lisbon Strategy’s
limitations. If incentives are derived by politicians from the comparative
advantage of their own country, they should refrain from adopting common
reforms. Indeed, the varying roles played by governments in different
models of capitalism underline the dangers of developing a uniform mode
of EU governance. Thatcher hints at this conclusion, when he suggests
that the regulatory approach to governance implied by the Single Market
Programme suits the UK, but not Germany and France. 11 Similarly,
Amable warns that developing a common approach to economic reform,
disregarding national differences, could lead to a political backlash. 12
Some VoC scholars would appear to be more open to the idea of an EU
reform agenda than others. Iversen, for one, argues that in “sectors of the
economy and the labour market where trade and the division of labour
has traditionally been limited”, different models of capitalism might
experience pressures for convergence that result in adopting common
policies across countries. 13 In this way, national economies can experience
simultaneously both convergence and divergence in different sectors of
the economy. This view opens more room for shared EU programmes and
may help to explain the broad consensus among member states on the
need to complete the liberalisation of services within the single market.
On a more general note, there is also some commonality between the
Lisbon Strategy’s treatment of globalisation and that which underpins the
VoC. The European Council’s concluded at Lisbon in March 2000 that the
EU “is confronted with a quantum shift resulting from globalisation and
the challenges of a new knowledge-driven economy”. 14 In review of the
VoC debate, Hancké, Rhodes, and Thatcher argue that the question of how
Chapter 8 – Dermot Hodson and Marco Simoni 119