Southern Laggards or Misfits? A comparative assessment of energy policy Europeanization

Abstract

The concept of “Southern lag” describes the lack of compliance of Southern European countries with EU law which has had increased salience after the 2008 eurozone crisis. This article identifies the most binding constraints on energy policy, a previously overlooked area in the Southern lag debate. Two factors make the evaluation of the Europeanization of energy policy critical: first, the energy union is a key objective of the EU and understanding the constraints to compliance is essential for its success. Second, EU energy policy objectives provide concrete goals that make measuring Europeanization easier in terms of actual policy outcomes . This article first identifies the key explanations of this Southern lag that scholars have proposed. Then, it evaluates and compares the levels of compliance of Greece and Austria with EU energy policy objectives. By contrasting the empirical policy outcomes with the predictions of the various theories of Europeanization, this article establishes that the level of compliance is mostly determined by the level of misfit. A policy has a high misfit when it has high political and economic costs associated with its implementation. Furthermore, this comparative analysis introduces the importance of geography in affecting the level of misfit in energy policy. This result implies that the most successful strategies for Europeanization will be focused on bringing down the level of misfit by tailoring goals and policies to each country’s previous conditions. The eurozone crisis of 2008 brought to the forefront questions about Europeanization. As it became apparent that the hoped-for convergence among member-states in terms of both policy and economic performance had not materialized, many turned to exploring the reasons. Scholars had already sought to answer the question of why southern European countries seem to comply less and Europeanize slower than Northern ones. The 2008 crisis, however, and its overwhelming consequences for southern member-states gave the question new salience. Studying the divergence between north and south and understanding its causes is crucial to designing effective policies and avoiding the apparently consequential lackluster compliance in the future. This analysis seeks to do so by studying the Europeanization of Greece and Austria. It argues that even though Greece has made less progress on the Europeanization of its energy policy than Austria, this is due to the EU policies’ misfit with pre-existing institutions and energy policies. Greece, in other words, is not lacking the capacity nor the willingness to comply but the costs of its compliance are much higher than for Austria. This misfit is due to economic, political, and geographic factors that make compliance costlier for Greece. This analysis it makes 3 contributions: Firstly, it yields an in-depth analysis of the Europeanization of energy policy, an increasingly salient policy area both in Europe where the energy union occupies a high place on the political agenda and globally due to the advents of climate change and geopolitical developments. Second, it adds to the empirical evidence on the misfit-based explanations of Europeanization or lack thereof, showing that policy misfit is the driving factor of non-compliance in energy policy. Third, it provides another explanatory variable for policy misfit that has previously been overlooked: Geography. Geography influences the level of misfit through two channels: determining financial costs of infrastructure and the spillover effects of neighbors with higher level of Europeanization. The impact of the level of Europeanization of a country’s neighbor on its INTRODUCTION International Affairs and Economics, ESIA ‘19, ganagnstopoulos@gwu.edu