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Policies matter: the kind of political problem dealt with determines political structures, processes, and relationships. Applied to the European Union, this means that the underlying political conflicts dealt with - and more importantly those systematically absent from the Union's agenda - determine the institutional specificities of the polity. This analysis of how implementing eastern enlargement generated new supranational powers of the European Commission puts the analytical concept of to the test

AbstractMultilevel governance that spans beyond traditional hierarchical steering within states creates new policy enforcement challenges because it involves autonomous administrations of different jurisdictions in a single administrative act. Scrutinizing concrete new coordination tools, the article aims at conceptualizing coordination strategies and instruments to overcome structural problems in multilevel policy execution and trans‐boundary administration. The empirical findings on instrument innovation in the European Union highlight the increased strategic promotion of horizontal administrative coordination. The functioning logic and autonomy‐preserving character of such vertical coordination makes it a potential solution to functionally equivalent enforcement challenges on the global scale, exemplified by the administrative implementation of international trade agreements.

Policy coordination in multilevel systems faces particular coordination problems because competences to formulate and to apply law are usually attributed to different levels of the system. This article analyses recent innovations that indicate an extend use of horizontal cooperation. Based on a systematic illustration of horizontal administrative cooperation, the aim is to conceptualise the key characteristic of the underlying steering strategy as direct, decentralised and joint policy execution. Besides the supranational centralisation of administrative competences or the convergence of national administrative systems, horizontal cooperation thus represents a theoretically distinct approach to multilevel policy Implementation. Adapted from the source document.

The institutional architecture of the European Union is based on two fundamentally competing ideas: supranational rule and national sovereignty. These two underlying ideas are not reconcilable and work at different levels in the background of the policy debate. While on the normative level public sentiments remain strongly linked to the idea of state autonomy, on the cognitive level the paradigm of a functional necessity to cooperate is decisive for actual policy making. Only in some policy domains, such as the single market program, have policy-makers attempted to re-couple normative and cognitive ideas. In contrast to this, the central argument is that policy-makers mostly adhere to an alternative strategy: the systematic decoupling of normative and cognitive ideas. Focusing on public administration, it is shown how deft policy instrumentation allows actors to realize program ideas that satisfy demands for increased supranational governance. At the same time, however, these instruments are in dissonance with how policies are framed against the background of public sentiments that assume domestic bureaucratic independence.