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The British government's position in the 1996 IGC will reflect long-standing policy positions that have been shared by both main parties. This consistency in policy was partly masked by the tone of British statements on Europe during the Thatcher premierships. However, there was a change of tone when Major came to office, and this was followed by successful British diplomacy in the 1991 IGC on political union, with the result that, on the issues that are under discussion in the 1996 IGC, Britain is largely a status quo state. The government will resist far-reaching changes to the Treaty on European Union, especially any erosion of the three-pillar structure and any further extension of the competences of the European Community. However, it will want to see institutional changes agreed that will pave the way to further enlargement. In these objectives it is likely to find allies because the European Union as a whole has been moving in the British direction since Maastricht, because of public hostility to further integration, the collapse of the federalist coalition, and the 1995 enlargement. However, the influence of Conservative backbenchers is making it more difficult for the present government to adopt the right tone in negotiations. The policies of the Labour Party do not differ markedly from those of the Conservatives, except on social policy, and if there is a change of government before the end of the IGC, the removal of the so-called 'Euro- sceptic' influence on the diplomatic tone of the government might help Britain to achieve its objectives even more successfully than the present government could. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Market deregulation has been integral to economic globalization, but we do not know very much about the comparative dimension of reform, i.e., the performance of liberal and co-ordinated market economies. Co-ordinated market economies are often assumed to perform poorly in deregulation reform, while such reform is path-dependent to the liberal market economy model. The article compares the trajectory of market deregulation in these different ‘varieties of capitalism’. Drawing on the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development's ‘product market regulation indicators', the analysis shows that co-ordinated market economies have implemented more extensive deregulation than have the liberal market economies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The UK has long experience of immigration; Ireland until very recently was a country of emigration. Over the past decade both states have opened their borders to large numbers of economic migrants, notably from the new EU member states. In both states, the major political parties have broadly welcomed globalization and the benefits it can bring, and it is hard to discern a distinctive centre-right approach. Traditionally, the Conservatives have been seen as tougher on immigration than Labour in the UK, yet there has been little difference in practice between the two parties' policies in government. In Ireland, Fine Gael has primarily criticized the way the government implements its policies rather than showing any fundamental difference over substance. This article considers the changing patterns of migration, how these have affected discourse and policy in the UK and Ireland, and looks at why there is not a distinct centre-right approach in either state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the decisions behind group membership in the European Parliament (EP) using a rational-choice institutionalist framework. Following the goals ascribed to them by Strøm (1990) in other settings, national parties should join the largest group that matches their socioeconomic preferences. Yet, whilst explanations taking national parties as the basic unit of analysis might sometimes suffice, we argue that it is often necessary to consider the influence of individual parliamentarians and existing EP groups. The scope open to these various actors to pursue their interests determines the attractiveness of the various options available to a national party. We illustrate our conceptual framework by reference to the attempt by the British Conservative Party to leave the European People's Party-European Democrats (EPP-ED) group, an effort ending in the formation of an extra-parliamentary federation, the Movement for European Reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We miss the significance of the advent of the Euro for European political, economic, and social order if we ignore its identity dimension. Money has always been a symbolic marker in nation-building efforts and is strongly related to collective national identities. This article makes two interrelated causal claims. On the one hand, the introduction of Euro bills and coins has already begun to affect Euroland citizens' identification with the EU and Europe in general. The Euro makes Europe real and reifies it as a political order, since it provides a visible link from Brussels to the daily lives of the citizens. On the other hand, existing collective identities pertaining to the nation-state explain to a large degree how comfortable people feel using and dealing with the Euro. The variation in attitudes between the Italian enthusiasm for the Euro, the German ambivalence about it, and the widespread British opposition can be accounted for by the differences in collective understandings and identification patterns with the nation-state and Europe. In sum, the causal arrows from the Euro to collective identities run both ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines some of the processes conditioning both policy stability and policy change. It focuses on how established policy communities (usually associated with policy stability) can exist alongside a powerful dynamic of change within the policy subsystem. By listing and analysing agents of exogenous and endogenous stability and change, it is concluded that the concepts of epistemic communities, advocacy coalitions and choice of 'image' and 'venue' are useful in explaining the co-existence of stability and change. In the case of British trunk roads policy, this stability and change can be explained by the development of the road and environmental lobbies as rival adversarial policy communities operating in separate and competing policy arenas. The article concludes that, although one of the adversarial communities may hold an advantage over the other at a particular time, the scope for action in a number of different policy-making arenas makes it unlikely that it will retain supremacy over time. Radical change is most likely to be brought about by factors exogenous to policy communities such as scientific and technological developments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article assesses the impact of three distinct types of pressure for regulatory change on the two contrasting sectors of legal and medical service provision. These have been driven by both regional and global integration processes. The article focuses on the distinctive forms of regulatory competition which have developed at the European level, within the framework of a highly managed system of mutual recognition, and on the very different strategies for managing regulatory reform at the national level which have developed in two of the larger member states of the European Union (EU): France and Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

States have chosen various international fora to negotiate on the disciplining of state aids through export credit insurance: the GATT, European Union (EU) and the OECD. Although on a global level the violation of the strict GATE rules on export credit insurance could be ignored, on the regional EU level, market integration and competition and common commercial policies created pressures to harmonize national credit insurance policies. In the resulting regional negotiating process, intergovernmental factors have prevailed over supranational/transnational factors. Neither transnational interest groups nor the European Parliament and the Commission have been important actors in this process. The real political issue of competition distortion between exporters of different member states has been taken care of by the member states in a special co-ordination group, set up by the Council. Although national preferences with regard to harmonizing official credit insurance policy have converged as a consequence of rising cumulative deficits on these insurance schemes in all member states and the pressure of market factors such as increasing cross-border co-operation, the harmonization process appears to be confined to transparency and harmonization of insurance techniques and limited co-operation among public insurers in the case of consortium exports. All proposals to create a European credit insurance facility or a binding, common credit insurance policy were turned down or ignored, because of the far-reaching consequences for the future policy autonomy of the member states. The question of whether the credit insurance policies should also be disciplined, i.e. whether the level of subsidy should be lowered, was not addressed, for fear of disadvantaging EU exporters against government-supported non-EU competitors. Consequently, the United Kingdom sought to turn from a regional to a more global arena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article sets out a series of conditions for the successful transfer of an organizational or policy initiative from one country to another. It then assesses whether recent developments in the organization of British central government provide a model for transfer to other European countries which have also been concerned with a separation between policy-making functions and execution through service delivery agencies. The article concludes by suggesting caution in attempting to use the Next Steps initiative in Britain as a model for transfer to other European countries, since it lacks a valid theory of administration, has no clear operational blueprint to copy, is not the sole method used by British government itself, and would not necessarily map well on to countries with different relationships between ministers, agencies, the core bureaucracy and the legislature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]