CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2016
| Author | Maricut, Adina Maria |
|---|---|
| Title | The Institutional Development of the EU's Area of Freedom, Security and Justice: Roles, Behaviors, and the Logic of Justification |
| Summary | This thesis explores evolving patterns of European Union (EU) institutional behavior in the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice (AFSJ). The starting point is the puzzling development of the AFSJ on the EU agenda, which cannot be neatly subsumed under any of the existing theoretical conceptualizations of decision-making in the EU. Given the continuous expansion of the AFSJ since the Maastricht Treaty (1993), the roles of the four decision-making institutions in the field—the European Council, the Council, the European Commission, and the European Parliament—have been anything but stable. Over time, institutional behavior in the AFSJ has displayed both continuity and inconsistencies in its patterns. The academic literature can only partly account for these patterns, mainly because the rapid and fragmented development of the field has made scholars focus predominantly on individual institutions, specific time periods, or single AFSJ subfields. To address this gap, the present thesis introduces an alternative approach to explaining different patterns of institutional behavior in the AFSJ throughout time. Theoretically, the argument draws on insights from organizational theory regarding institutional role expectations combined with the work of political theorist Michael Saward on representative claims-making. It is posited that institutional behavior in the AFSJ cannot be fully understood without examining how each institution seeks to legitimize its role in the EU political system. If treaty rules provide the organizational structure within which institutional roles develop, officials give substance to these roles by constantly justifying policy positions and decisions for the benefit of a constituency they claim to represent. But since the boundaries of constituencies are ambiguous in the EU political system, officials have significant leeway to portray their respective constituency in various ways, providing different lines of justification. The qualitative longitudinal study of institutional behavior in the AFSJ from the perspective of patterns of justification is divided into three parts. First, the origins of institutional justification in the AFSJ are traced back to the period before the field became a formal area of EU activity (1984-93). Second, the consolidation and diversification of institutional lines of justification are identified during the gradual communitarization of the field from the Maastricht to the Lisbon Treaty (1994-2009). Third, the stabilization in variation of institutional justification in the AFSJ is illustrated in the post-Lisbon context (2010-2014). The analysis reveals that the more competences EU institutions gained in the AFSJ, the broader the universe of constituencies in the name of whom representative claims could be made, and accordingly the higher the possibility for heterogeneous and even contrasting patterns of institutional justification. The focus on justification additionally allows the identification of mechanisms of inter-institutional conflict in the AFSJ, which is shown to occur when institutions defend policy positions by making competitive representative claims. The findings are based on an analysis of institutional discourse present in official documents, media content, and interview material. The argument finds synergies with new intergovernmentalist expectations regarding institutional roles in new areas of EU activity as well as with constructivist studies underlining the importance of norms in driving institutional behavior. The main contribution lies in providing an explanation of institutional behavior that takes into account the institutional architecture in the AFSJ as a whole and at various moments in time. Simultaneously, the thesis articulates a framework that contributes to the theorization of EU institutional roles as norm-rooted, fluid, and heterogeneous. |
| Supervisor | Puetter, Uwe |
| Department | School of Public Policy PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2016/maricut_adina.pdf |
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