Date: 2023
Type: Contribution to book
Integration through funding
Ruth WEBER (ed.), The financial constitution of European integration : follow the money?, Oxford : Hart Publishing, 2023, Research handbooks in law and politics series, pp. 116-131
DE WITTE, Bruno, Integration through funding, in Ruth WEBER (ed.), The financial constitution of European integration : follow the money?, Oxford : Hart Publishing, 2023, Research handbooks in law and politics series, pp. 116-131
- https://hdl.handle.net/1814/76254
Retrieved from Cadmus, EUI Research Repository
The European Union does not have an army or a police force. Its budget is small. It achieves its integration aims mainly by regulating – by making laws that apply throughout Europe. It is often noted that ‘what the EU lacks in terms of material capacity, it partly compensates for by regulation’.[1] This contrasts with federal systems where the ‘power of the purse’ of the federal state plays an important role in governance, in two different ways: by operating direct transfers to the member states for their general use; and by funding the member states or local authorities for specific purposes decided at the federal level. The latter is often described as the ‘federal spending power’. By spending money, the federal level exercises power, in that it can force or at least encourage the member states or local authorities to pursue the policy preferences set at the federal level. In the European Union, general financial transfers from the European to the member state level do not exist (quite the opposite, in fact); however, there are various ways in which the European Union uses its ‘spending power’ to try and steer the policy choices made at the national or local level. Such integration through funding forms the object of this chapter. As is the case with European-level law-making, the question whether a given policy requires spending at EU level depends on an assessment of the added value compared to action taken by national governments alone.[2] However, public expenditure by the EU is not only subject to such a subsidiarity test. It is also subject to other constraints of EU constitutional law that will be discussed in the next sections: it should remain within the limits of the competences conferred on the Union by the Treaties (section 2); and it must respect the rules and limits imposed by EU public finance law (section 3). After that, section 4 will give a general overview of the main policy areas in which integration through funding is happening. Section 5 will explore the way in which instruments for emergency funding have recently been turned into instruments to achieve the EU’s general policy goals, and section 6 will show how cohesion policy has now become the institutional seat of broadly based integration-through-funding mechanisms.
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Published online: 2023
Cadmus permanent link: https://hdl.handle.net/1814/76254
Full-text via DOI: 10.5040/9781509969944
Publisher: Hart Publishing
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