POLITICS VERSUS SCIENCE: APPORTIONING ... - Buffalo State

To these arguments we might add the Commission’s uncertainty over the long-run
efficacy of divided competencies as expressed in the White Paper (2000d, item #40):
As indicated earlier, the existing Treaty provisions impose constraints on the
activities that can be attributed to the Authority, but this should not be taken to
mean that a possible future extension of its competencies should be discounted.
Such an extension should only be considered in the light of the experience with
the functioning of the Authority and the confidence gained in its operation,
including the possible need to change the Treaty.
Our third question requires that we extrapolate beyond the food safety regime in
asking us to evaluate food safety policy within the broader framework of regulatory
governance in the European Union. Here the answer lies in the efficacy of policy
networks. The European Commission reliance on networks is a neo-functionalism
experiment in creating a Europe of people rather than a Europe of states. Whether this
postnational vision of governance will provide the security and prosperity of the nation-
state remains to be seen. This leads us directly into the fourth question: the expected
impact of EU’s regulatory regime in the on-going construction of an international
regulatory regime for safety. This is postnationalism writ large, the functionalism
advocated in the interwar period and come to pass in the age of the WWW and jet travel.
Yet it depends wholly on the success of a norms-based approach that conservatives
dismiss as naïve and postmodernists as naïve as it is ethnocentric.
Our final question asks whether the policy network approach can ensure food
safety in an EU-25. Cosmopolitans have expressed reservations about the financial
capacity of the CEECs to root out corruption and improve administrative capacities.
Indeed, the European Commission (2002b) continues to warn the CEECs over
unacceptably high levels of corruption. Despite the EU’s attempt to diffuse Western
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