Introduction: On the contents and limits of this Living Review article

1 Introduction: On the contents and limits of this Living Review article

The division of competences between the EU and its member states has been one of the most important issues in the discussion on the institutional reform and in the Convention process. From the outset, European integration was about the transfer of powers from the national to the European level, which evolved as explicit bargaining among governments or as an incremental drift. With the competence issue entering the agenda of constitutional policy, this process was reframed. While power refers to the capability of a government, an institution or an actor to make policies or to pursue interests, the notion of competence refers to the reasons and the limits to apply powers. Thus the discussion is shifted to the normative, if not constitutional aspect. It concerns the shape of the European multilevel polity, in particular the way in which powers are allocated, delimited and linked between the different levels.

The normative discussion on competences cannot and should not be isolated from the empirical questions of why and which competences are allocated in reality. First of all, the actual structure of the EU did not result from a deliberate constitutional design but from an ongoing integration process. Second, the competence issue arose in the wake of increasing tensions caused by the dynamics of European integration (Majone 2004 ). In order to avoid an abstract normative analysis, we have to understand the driving forces of this process. Third, in processes of institutional reform or constitutional policy, normative arguing is enmeshed with bargaining over power (Elster 1998 ), and the outcome of these processes is influenced by reasons and interests. Therefore, research on the “vertical” dimension of the multilevel system should cover both aspects.

From these two perspectives, the following review article summarises research on the relations between the EU and the national and sub-national level. Section 2 covers contributions to normative theories of a European federation. The focus is on relevant works by political scientists, but we also refer to publications by lawyers and economists, which are relevant in this context. Section 3 deals with the empirical issue of how to explain the actual allocation of competences between levels. Here, our intention is not to give a comprehensive survey of integration theory (Pollack 2005 ; Rosamond 2000 ; Wiener and Diez 2003 ). We will present publications in this field in a selective way, i.e. only in so far as they explain the transfer of competence from the national to the European level or the limits of this centralistic dynamic.

The final part discusses the consequences of the vertical allocation of powers for European governance (Section 4). As both normative and empirical theories contradict the assumption of a separation of competences, politics and policy-making in the EU have to be regarded as multilevel governance. We will summarise the main approaches and results from empirical research before we end with conclusions and recommendations for further research (Section 5).