What does EU law truly mean for the member states? This book presents the first encompassing and in-depth empirical study of the effects of 'voluntaristic' and (partly) 'soft' EU policies in all 15 member states. The authors examine 90 case studies across a range of EU Directives and shed light on burning contemporary issues in political science, integration theory, and social policy. They reveal that there are major implementation failures and that, to date, the European Commission has not been able adequately to perform its control function.

In Strategies of Compliance with the European Court of Human Rights, Andreas von Staden looks at the nature of human rights challenges in two enduring liberal democracies—Germany and the United Kingdom. Employing an ambitious data set that covers the compliance status of all European Court of Human Rights judgments rendered until 2015, von Staden presents a cross-national overview of compliance that illustrates a strong correlation between the quality of a country's democracy and the rate at which judgments have met compliance. Tracing the impact of violations in Germany and the United Kingdom specifically, he details how governments, legislators, and domestic judges responded to the court's demands for either financial compensation or changes to laws, policies, and practices. Framing his analysis in the context of the long-standing international relations debate between rationalists who argue that actions are dictated by an actor's preferences and cost-benefit calculations, and constructivists, who emphasize the influence of norms on behavior, von Staden argues that the question of whether to comply with a judgment needs to be analyzed separately from the question of how to comply. According to von Staden, constructivist reasoning best explains why Germany and the United Kingdom are motivated to comply with the European Court of Human Rights judgments, while rationalist reasoning in most cases accounts for how these countries bring their laws, policies, and practices into sufficient compliance for their cases to be closed. When complying with adverse decisions while also exploiting all available options to minimize their domestic impact, liberal democracies are thus both norm-abiding and rational-instrumentalist at the same time—in other words, they choose their compliance strategies rationally within the normative constraint of having to comply with the Court's judgments.

The book examines how the interests of the member states, which provide the primary driving force for developments in European integration, are internalised and addressed by the law of the European Union. In this context, member state interests are taken to mean the policy considerations, economic calculations, local socio-cultural factors, and the raw expressions of political will which shape EU policies and determine member state responses to the obligations arising from those policies. The book primarily explores the junctions and disjunctions between member state interests defined in such a manner and EU law, where the latter expresses either an obligation for the member states to comply with common policies or an acceptance of member state particularism under the common EU framework.

This 2005 book argues that Europeanization and globalization have led to ever-more intensive legalization at transnational level. What accounts for compliance beyond the nation-state? The authors tackle this question by comparing compliance with regulations that have been formulated in a very similar way at different levels of governance. They test compliance with rules at the national level, at the regional level (EU), and at a global level (WTO), finding that in fact the EU has higher levels of compliance than both international and national rules. The authors argue that this is because the EU has a higher level of legalization, combined with effective monitoring mechanisms and sanctions. In this respect it seems that the European Union has indeed achieved a high level of legalization and compliance, though the authors add that this achievement does not settle the related queries with the legitimacy of transnational governance and law.

Examining the growing issue of EU Member States' defiance in the face of EU law, this volume outlines the development and history of this crisis, and offers a theoretical and comparative analysis of the difficulties the EU is facing in their attempts to enforce Member State to comply with European integration, suggesting solutions for the future.

This book offers a rigorous empirical and theoretical analysis of an important dimension of European integration - the implementation of EU legislation and its effect in the wake of the accession of ten new member states to the EU in 2004. The authors concentrate on the key field of social policy, which is of vital interest for the viability of the welfare state and the future of labour law standards in Europe. Following on from a previous prize-winning study, Complying with Europe: EU Harmonization and Soft Law in the Member States, this new volume looks at how EU social legislation works in practice, particularly in Central and Eastern European countries. The authors offer in-depth empirical case studies of three of the most significant pieces of EU social legislation: the Working Time Directive, the Equal Treatment Directive and the Employment Equality Directive. Their analysis makes it possible for the authors to make useful generalizations for the policy field as a whole.

Why Noncompliance traces the history of noncompliance within the European Union (EU), focusing on which states continuously do or do not follow EU Law, why, and how that affects the governance in the EU and beyond. In exploring the EU's long and varied history of noncompliance, Tanja A. Börzel takes a close look at the diverse groups of noncompliant states throughout the EU's existence. Why do states that are vocally critical of the EU have a better record of compliance than those that support the EU? Why has noncompliance been declining since the 1990s, even though the EU was adding member-states and numerous laws? Börzel debunks conventional wisdoms in EU compliance research, showing that noncompliance in the EU is not caused by the new Central and Eastern European member states, nor by the Eurosceptic member states. So why do these states take the brunt of Europe's misplaced ire? Why Noncompliance introduces politicization as an explanatory factor that has been long overlooked in the literature and scholarship surrounding the European Union. Börzel argues that political controversy combined with voting power and administrative capacity, explains why noncompliance with EU law has been declining since the completion of the Single Market, cannot be blamed on the EU's Central and Easter European member states, and is concentrated in areas where EU seeks to protect citizen rights. Thanks to generous funding from Freie Universitat Berlin, the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.