Europe à la carte. Is there a differentiated integration through the backdoor?

Why does resistance occur when member states have to implement the legal acts of the European Union? Is it the lack of willingness or the lack of ability that leads to this resistance? Are the effects of these explanatory factors significant for all major policy sectors or only for some? In this paper, conventional hypothesis of the compliance literature are tested in a comparative manner across different policy sectors.

The concept of willingness is based on the preferences of the citizens and enterprises. The preferences are operationalized by the public support of the EC and the degree of intra EU trade. The concept of ability includes hypotheses on the quality of national bureaucracies and the domestic political constraints.

The degree of resistance is measured by the number of reasoned opinions sent to an EU member state within infringement procedures. The data contains all infringement proceedings in the “old” 15 member states over the period from 1978 to 2007. An innovation of this paper is the analysis of the hypothesis across eight substantive areas of EU law. This allows for a sectoral comparison of the interdependencies regarding the problems that occur during the implementation of European legal acts.

The results show, that there are crucial differences regarding the significant effects of the hypothesis in the different areas of EU Law. For example, in the area of tax law only the ability hypothesis had a significant influence, while the cases relating to the freedom of establishment favor the willingness concept.