Greece in the European Union

This is the second volume in the series published by Routledge on Europe and the Nation State. As such, its empirical focus is on the complex relationship between European integration and the nation state principally, though not solely, in the context of the European Union (EU) and its Member States as well as those applicant states that are currently on the threshold of membership.

Edited by Dionyssis G. Dimitrakopoulos and Argyris G. Passas, this collection comprises a work of nine chapters on Greece in the EU. It is an intriguing survey of the role of the Greek state in the EU policy process from the particular standpoint of public policy. The skeletal framework of the book is constructed to highlight four distinct types of public policies: distributive, redistributive, regulative and constituent. Together these policy types, drawn from Theodore Lowi’s standard typology, rely upon two principal dimensions, namely the nature of the exercise of coercion and the environment in which such coercion is exercised. The relationship between these dimensions shapes and determines how Greek public policy is effectively formulated and implemented in the EU. And the interaction of these dimensions is keenly felt where the national, supranational and intergovernmental policy arenas overlap and intermingle at the interface between the EU and the Greek state. It is this complex engagement that informs the book and holds it together.

In Part I, the Introduction, the editors guide us through the conventional public policy phases of formulation and implementation, and it is here that we first encounter the term ‘Europeanisation’ that in recent years has gained such popular currency. Dimitrakopoulos and Passas utilise a simple, straightforward conception of this fashionable term when they reduce it to a two-step notion that recognises the evolution of a new institutional framework at the European level which shares power with the Member States and the implications of this dynamic power-sharing process for the norms, structures and policies of the constituent states of the EU. The impact of Europeanisation is inherently many-sided and it clearly varies across different policy sectors at different times and speeds and with varying intensities. It is the intention of the editors to try to capture this complex, differentiated policy impact in order to understand and explain it with much more accuracy and precision than has hitherto been the case.

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