CEU Jean Monnet Lectures: Professor Gelda Falkner Addresses Challenges in EU Law Implementation

The 2010 Guest Lectures of the Jean Monnet Module on European Integration continued on March 4th, featuring Gerda Falkner, Director of the Institute for European Integration Research at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Professor at the Department of Government, University of Vienna, who delivered her lecture: “Implementing EU Policies: Challenges for the Member States and the European Commission.”

Falkner began her lecture with an overview of the pillars of European social policy from its inception in the 1950s, moving from an initial emphasis on non-interventionism towards a more inclusive balance between the European economic project and a parallel social structure to handle the externalities produced by the progressive integration of European economies.

According to Falkner by 2009, this process had resulted in 80 binding EU laws concerning social policy, which deal with three main areas: anti-discrimination provisions (whose scope now reaches matters of gender, age, religion and sexual orientation); working conditions; and technical aspects of health and safety for European workers.

The second part of the talk focused on concerns over the implementation of these policies. Falkner finds that the quality of implementation differs substantially among EU member states, citing her own past and present research projects, which highlight a remarkably low degree of prompt and correct transposition of European directives into domestic law in the older members of the EU. In the new member states, Falkner has found a higher level of transposition, yet problems remain on the issue of implementation, which she attributed to relatively weaker state structures including backlogged courts and weak civil society actors.

Gerda Falkner studied political science, economics and journalism at the University of Vienna (MA 1987). She holds a post-graduate degree in European integration from the College of Europe, Bruges/Belgium (M.E.S. 1991). She was Research Group Director at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne from 1998 to 2003. From 2002 to August 2008 she was Head of the Department of Political Science at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna. Since 2008 she is serving as Director of the Institute for European Integration Research at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. She is a professor at the Department of Government, University of Vienna.