Book Reviews Mény, Yves, Pierre Muller and Jean-Louis Quermonne (eds). Adjusting to Europe: The Impact of the European Union on National Institutions and Policies. London, New York: Routledge, 1996. Pp. xi, 174. Index. One of the most important topics relating to integration, and one of the least explored, is the institutional impact of the European Union on its Member States. This edited volume, which brings together some of the top experts in the field, provides a much needed introduction to the topic by examining how the European Community has articulated national interests, how national bureaucracies have adapted to the European Union, and how European policy has affected domestic policies. The editors argue that the convergence of public policies in Europe is leading to ‘a kind of co-operative federalism without a state’ promoted by the emergence of a single European political agenda, a European space for new forms of interest representation, and European modes of operation among actors involved in public decision-making. In a series of highly informative chapters, contributors to the volume demonstrate just how such convergence has affected policy-making within Member States. They show how, while all countries find their national bureaucracies increasingly taken up with European decision-making, some countries manage their relations with the EU more effectively than others, exercising more strategic influence where there is more centralized national coordination of EU decision-making. This is the case in France or Great Britain (where there is internal agreement on policy), by contrast with Germany, which nevertheless benefits from similarities with the EU in administrative culture, unlike France. They also discuss the effect of the EU’s overriding focus on market-oriented policies, its lack of coordinated social policy, and the failure of European attempts at voluntaristic industrial policy, which have pushed Member States to deregulate while leaving them with full responsibility in the social policy arena and with little possibility for interventionist industrial policy. Most importantly, however, the different chapters make clear that whatever the European convergence of public policies, national institutions, policy styles and processes remain distinct, as does the European public sphere, which is itself not readily identifiable in terms of any single pre-existing set of national institutions, policy styles or processes. Rather, the European Union’s institutional form is highly variable across domains of competency and likely to remain so, while its emerging policy style will continue to be more flexible, heterogeneous, and issue-specific than any corresponding national style, with an open policy-making process managed by Commission officials in an anticipatory and consensual manner in which interest representation is sectorally structured and linked with a vast and somewhat incoherent network of national and Europe-wide groups. In short, the European Union, as this excellent collection of essays makes clear, is much more than the sum of its Member States, since it is a new institutional complex in its own right that is also increasing the complexity of its constituent parts. Vivien Schmidt University of Massachusetts, Boston
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