This study is concerned with the impact of European policies on national administrations. In selecting this research topic, one could in principle focus on both the formulation and implementation of European policies. One could argue that explaining domestic administrative change in the light of European policy requirements is not merely a matter of analysing the process of implementation but also, and primarily, a matter of analysing why and how certain policy choices have been made at the supranational level. Several studies on the dynamics of the supranational policy-making process seem to underline this necessity. Both research carried out in the field of health and safety at work and environmental policy indicates that supranational policy-making in these areas is characterised by a process of ‘regulatory competition’ between member states (Héritier et al. 1994; Héritier, Knill and Mingers 1996; Eichener 1996). Individual states strive to avoid potential costs of administrative adjustment emerging from European policies that diverge from domestic provisions. The competition between the existing national administrative systems, which is inherent in regulatory competition, may therefore be taken as the basic starting point for studying the impact of European policies on national administrations.

Although many analytical insights can be gained by examining administrative changes in the context of the whole European policy cycle, this study takes another path. Its main focus is on the process of European policy implementation at the national level and the administrative changes following from this.

The analysis of basic characteristics of British and German administrative traditions, as they are defined by the distinctive macro-institutional context given in both countries, provides us with the necessary background knowledge in order to assess the institutional scope of European adaptation requirements. In other words, we are able to identify whether European requirements for sectoral adjustments imply challenges of the core or remain within the core of national administrative traditions.

I have argued, however, that, notwithstanding the general stability and continuity of administrative traditions, exceptional changes in these core arrangements cannot be fully precluded. Although not putting into question the validity of our institutional explanation (based on the concept of adaptation pressure), such developments reduce its predictive reliability. As pointed out in chapter 3, this problem can partly be captured by identifying the structural potential for administrative reforms, which is itself an institutionalised feature of the macro-institutional context and hence might may vary from country to country (Knill 1999). The concept of national administrative reform capacity serves as indicator for the overall reliability of the institution-based hypotheses on domestic administrative adjustments in the light of European requirements, although we can predict neither the occurrence nor the timing of administrative reforms.

The national capacity for administrative reforms depends on the number of formal and factual institutional veto points administrative actors have at their disposal in order to influence and resist political reform initiatives.

The underlying study was written in the context of a broader research project on ‘European Integration and the Transformation of the State’ which was funded under the Leibniz Programme of the German Science Foundation (DFG) and conducted by Adrienne Héritier. I am particularly grateful to Adrienne not only for her continuous support and encouragement, but also for providing me with the great opportunity to carry out my work at three of Europe's ‘finest addresses’ in political and social science: the University of Bielefeld; the Max-Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne; and the European University Institute in Florence.

I am also particularly indebted to Yves Mény. It was on the basis of his initiative that I was able to carry out a research project on ‘The Impact of National Administrative Traditions on the Implementation of EU Environmental Policy’ at the Robert-Schuman Centre of the European University Institute. This project, which was financed by the European Commission, is of major theoretical and empirical relevance for the underlying study. I am grateful to Yves for the provision of administrative and logistical support through the Robert-Schuman Centre as well as his scientific commitment to the project and his continuous advice. Furthermore, I want to express my particular thanks to Roland Czada, the director of the Institute of Political Science at the University of Hagen.

The starting point of this study was to investigate the impact of European policies on national administrations. To what extent can we expect administrative change at the national level in order to comply with European policy demands and to what extent does domestic change lead to administrative convergence across member states? How can the observed patterns of administrative transformation be explained? In addressing these questions, the purpose of this concluding part is twofold, namely, to illustrate our theoretical and analytical considerations from a comparative perspective and to assess the extent to which these considerations can be generalised.

The Irish not only are Catholic in name, belonging to an imaginary religious community, but are also devout practitioners. In 1990, 82 percent of Irish Catholics attended weekly Mass, the highest proportion of any population in the world. The Irish became and remained more Catholic than most other Catholic Europeans if measured by devotion, church attendance, and conviction. The “Irish Devotional Resolution” reflected the loss of language and cultural identity during the nineteenth century and was nourished by the growing resistance to Anglicization. Not until the 1850s, however, did institutional Catholicism plant itself firmly in the Irish mentality. The Great Famine (1845–49) destroyed the livelihood of a rural underclass, whose main religious practices included magic. The famine, which killed nearly one million people and forced another million to seek their fortunes overseas, led to the disappearance of this vast rural underclass and introduced new ideas about land ownership and inheritance rights. The Catholic elite and tenant farmers encouraged the adoption of new rules on ownership with a view to modernizing Ireland and from then on priests, brothers, and nuns became important fixtures in the average Irish household. After the famine disaster, the modernizing state handed over the task of civilizing the Irish population to the Church, which assumed responsibility for fostering discipline, education, and civility. By the time that the Irish Free State was founded in 1922, Catholic ethics were internalized in the minds and hearts of the Irish to the extent that they viewed no conflict between individual autonomy and definition of the good life and that of the Church.

A good society, according to Nordic definitions, checks human passions that produce drunkenness, lewdness, and rituals of anti-social behavior. A society that fails to civilize its members confronts self-centered hedonism. Married to a strong belief in social engineering, successive generations of elected officials endeavored to minimize the consumption of alcohol and to ban recreational drug-taking. Sweden, like Finland, was part of the vodka-belt and occasions of sociability were often an excuse to get extremely drunk. For more than a century, this style of drinking provoked little concern although distilled spirits were the subject of a lengthy political struggle between the Swedish monarchy and the peasantry. But the bone of contention was the discretionary right to impose excise taxes on distilled liquor and to sell surplus spirits. The Swedish monarchy depended on alcohol taxes to finance its budget and repeatedly tried to take away from the peasant communities the right to produce and sell vodka. In 1824, the monarchy admitted defeat and the production, sale, and distribution of spirits fell into private hands. By the 1850s, according to the official historiography of Swedish drinking, the nation was succumbing to permanent drunkenness, as each man, woman, and child was said to consume as much as 46 liters of brännvin or Swedish vodka per year, which was the equivalent of nearly half a liter of pure alcohol per week. Other figures cited the annual production of 22 million gallons of pure alcohol for a population of 3 million.

Rather suddenly, drinking rituals, which dated from the introduction of spirits in Sweden in the eighteenth century, became a major concern in the late nineteenth century.

A 1992 report by the European Parliament made the allegation that the power of criminal organizations was growing at an alarming rate and was having serious effects on society and on the political institutions of the member states. It continued to note ominously that organized crime undermined the foundations of the legitimate economy and threatened the stability of the states of the Community. In this ongoing debate on international crime, much attention is given to the aberration of Dutch drug policy with its open retail trade in cannabis and tolerance for the petty trade in hard drugs. At the same time, many member states have in fact incorporated selected features of the Dutch method into their own systems. In 1994, the German Federal Court urged the Länder to differentiate drug offenses according to the nature of the stimulant. Belgium, Denmark, Italy, the United Kingdom, and Spain have also dropped the US-style “war on drugs” model. Chiefs of government, however, are hesitant to openly endorse a moderate anti-drug approach, as opposed to local authorities, which are willing to experiment with new anti-drug methods. Of course, there is a core group of countries (France and Sweden) that unconditionally rejects drug toleration and they carry the upper hand in official EU deliberations since the EU itself perceives drugs as an internal security challenge.

Internal security dominates the official discussion on drugs in Brussels and at intergovernmental meetings because European cooperation arose from numerous attempts to deepen policing, custom, and judicial cooperation. In other words, drug policy coordination falls under the remit of the Ministers of Home Affairs and Justice.

In spite of its notoriety, Dutch drug control policy resembles that of many other advanced industrialized countries. Emma Bonino, the former Commissioner for Consumer Policy and for Humanitarian Affairs of the European Union came out in public in favor of Dutch-style decriminalization of cannabis, after the European Drugs Observatory issued a report showing “little relationship” between strict prohibitionist policies and reductions in the number of drug offenses. Nevertheless, the Netherlands is known as Europe's drug Mecca. The aim of this chapter is to highlight how Dutch drug policy diverges from conventional standards, why this particular form of intervention is representative of Dutch collective selfidentity, and how institutions and interests interpret and rationalize the Dutch way of doing things.

The Netherlands deviates from the rest of Europe in that it views the circulation of illicit drugs as a public health issue rather than a law and order crisis. Like Nordic alcohol policy, Dutch drug policy aims to reduce harm to the individual and society so that assistance and prevention go hand in hand with detection and prosecution of punishable offenses. Three government departments are involved in drug policy deliberation and implementation: Interior, Justice, and Public Health. The latter is in charge of overall coordination. Of course, as every tourist will testify, the most striking facet of Dutch drug policy is the coffee shop. This establishment sells small amounts of hashish and marijuana for personal use alongside ordinary refreshments. First opened in Amsterdam, coffee shops are now found across the country.

In the past fifteen years or so, the scope and density of European Union activities have increased immensely. This study seeks to understand how these developments affect the normative and causal beliefs of the member states. The research design I employed examined singular or deviant morality frameworks, which endured in spite of the ascendance of very different models of behavior in the rest of the European Union. I argued that these morality standards survived new styles of thought and practices because of their centrality to the definition of collective self-identity. Collective ideas on controversial matters, such as drinking alcohol, drug use, or abortion, which deviate from mainstream thinking, foster a sense of national belonging.

Institutional action and political decisions in the spheres of abortion, alcohol, and drugs disclose deeply held beliefs on the self, personhood, and state governance. In the Western world, the self is considered subjective and aspires to autonomy and personal fulfillment. We find our identity through acts of choice and we are not dependent on the authority of religion or traditional morality. Notions of personhood vary greatly from culture to culture and variations reflect different social, political, and economic arrangements as well as different legal, religious, and philosophical legacies. I have argued in this book that Nordic alcohol control policy and the Irish proscription on abortion deviate from the European or Western conceptualization of the self in that they continue to subordinate the freedom to choose to the right of a higher authority to make decisions.

Charles Mackay (1814–89), a Scottish poet, journalist, song-writer, and author of Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions, once wrote that nations, like individuals, have their whims and their peculiarities, their seasons of excitement and recklessness. If nations have indeed such things as national personalities and habits, then the past ten years offer an intriguing glimpse of how they have adapted to post-Maastricht Europe. This book examines the fate of national cultures, defined here in anthropological terms as everyday socialization, beliefs, norms, institutions, and common behavior in light of the challenges brought by European institution- and market-building. To be sure, numerous studies explore the challenges faced by national governments as they attempt to preserve or redefine national identities or cultures. My contribution to this debate is twofold. First, I describe the formation of national identity and institutions emblematic of the national traits of a country. I concentrate on the national governance of socially sensitive policies and will argue that variations in morality norms shed light on some of the most important aspects of state and national identity. My examples are Dutch drug policy, more liberal than the rest of Europe, Nordic alcohol control policy, more restrictive than the rest of Europe, Markets and moral regulation and Irish policy towards sexual morality, more conservative than the rest of Europe.

Second, I will discuss how constitutive rules, specifying proper behavior, cope with pressures emanating from the expansion of European governance, policies, and institutions. This book's overall conclusion is that national peculiarities are shrinking and that a modest rate of cultural convergence has occurred.

This book is about the impact of market integration and supranational institution–building on Europe's cultural diversity. Europe is known for its rich mélange of cultures and this diversity, many observers agree, impedes the task of building a genuine political union. I ask in this study whether cultural diversity is diminishing and, if so, how this process unfolds, and what the actual consequences will be for Europe. My findings indicate that member governments are experiencing a loss of national sovereignty in the cultural sphere and that external pressures result in an ever so slight convergence of different styles of thought and actions. But I also show that the actual pace of adaptation is extremely gradual and that the immediate effect on the European Union is modest. My case studies are alcohol control policy in Finland and Sweden, drug policy in the Netherlands, and abortion in Ireland. I selected these issue areas because each sheds light on the conviction and collective rules of the national polity and thus opens a window on to Dutch, Irish, Finnish, and Swedish culture. At their most basic, drug and alcohol policies are public measures to regulate the circulation of mind-altering substances in society. But the way in which governments define the challenge and the kinds of measures they pursue communicates how a national community assesses the risks of intoxication for the individual and society. In turn, that assessment is colored by specific legal, historical, social, and institutional factors and is embedded in a public discourse and narrative. Likewise, the Irish constitutional ban on abortion encapsulates the centrality of Catholic teaching in Irish politics, culture, and institutional structures.