From the Europeanization of Law-Making to the Europeanization
of National Legal Orders: The Case of Austria
Marcelo Jenny & Wolfgang C. Müller
Department of Political Science
University of Mannheim
ABSTRACT
This article addresses the scope of legal Europeanization with regard to Austria, a 1995 accession
country. Depending on the choice among several plausible indicators of legal Europeanization, the
relative impact of the EU varies greatly. The share of EU-related legislation peaked in the preaccession period when most of the acquis communautaire needed to be adopted. In the membership
period legislation that relates to the EU accounts for almost 25 percent of the enactments. Although
government decrees outnumber laws as means of transposition, EU-related rules constitute a much
smaller share of delegated legislation. Collectively, EU-related rules constitute a tenth of the Austrian
legal order. Yet, by mid-2003 42 percent of Austria’s original laws, the core of its legal order, were
related to EU rules. While missing some inflated expectations, legal Europeanization is indeed a major
feature of the Austrian legal order. The article confirms expectations derived from the political
controversy of EU affairs, federalism, and legal traditions.
1. Introduction
Being endowed with only moderate financial and personnel resources, what today is the
European Union, has drawn on its power to establish binding rules for its member states and
their citizens and hence evolved into a regulatory confederation (Majone et al. 1996; Majone
2005). Thus far legal Europeanization (i.e. policy harmonization through European law) is a
one-way street. In accordance with the idea of ‘ever closer’ integration, there is no history of
de-unionizing regulation. Even ‘negative integration’ (Scharpf 1999) – the removal of barriers
for the purpose of market integration – typically means re-regulation rather than deregulation. All this gives plausibility to the grand vision of Jacques Delors from 1988 that by
1998 the European Community would be the source of 80 per cent of economic and perhaps
even fiscal and social legislation governing EU member states. Of course, this prediction is a
perhaps biased speculation of a politician about real world developments and as such of
limited relevance. Yet, it is important as it raises an important substantive issue – the scope of
1
legal Europeanization – and because of its perception by important political actors and
academics (e.g. Hix 1999, 3), who have often taken it as an accurate description of reality.
When the famous Delors statement was made, Austria was not a member of the EU,
but it was in 1998. Largely due to its status as a permanently neutral country (that was chosen
in 1955 in order to get the Allied occupation forces out of the country) Austria could not take
part in the first steps of European integration as a full member of the club. However, it always
aimed at the closest relations with the emerging European Union that were possible under the
given circumstances. Thus, a number of treaties between Austria, or the EFTA countries,
respectively, and the EEC provided mutual market access. The single-market project provided
a final impetus for membership, which seemed possible now after the lifting of the iron
curtain and the breakdown of Communism in Eastern Europe. Austria applied for EC
membership in 1989, ratified the European Economic Area (EEA) Treaty in 1992, and
became a full EU member in 1995. Austria was a founding member of the European Currency
Union in 1999 and since deciding for full membership Austria’s ambition has been to shape
itself as a core country of the EU.
But what are the consequences of membership? A growing literature provides some
overall assessments on policy-making (e.g. Falkner 2000, 2006), the national coordination of
taking positions in EU bodies (Müller 2000, 2001), parliamentary scrutiny of EU affairs (e.g.
Blümel and Neuhold 2001; Müller et al. 2001; Pollak and Slominski 2003), and specific
policy consequences for various sectors. Notwithstanding the importance of these
contributions, there is no natural metric for their integration that provides us with a
comprehensive account of Austria’s Europeanization. Hence, overall assessments of the EU’s
impact on Austria often take their departure from the Delors estimate. Note, however, that
hearsay has tended to inflate the expectations. While Delors was careful to limit his claim to
economic legislation (with the possible extension to fiscal and social legislation), the popular
reading is just ‘legislation’. Interestingly, this is reflected in the perception of Austrian
political practitioners. According to the long-serving chairman of the finance committee of
the Austrian parliament Ewald Nowotny (1998) about 70 percent of all laws passed by the
Austrian parliament are either directly or indirectly the implementation of or adaptation to EU
directives (see also Wohnout 1999). Likewise, several other Austrian MPs have estimated
shares of up to 70 percent in their responses to open-ended questions in personal interviews
conducted in 1997–98 (Müller et al. 2001, 479). Similar estimates have been given by MPs
interviewed in 2005. However, not all politicians share such extensive interpretations of
Europeanization. The then president of parliament, Heinz Fischer, in an interview with the
2
Austrian television program ‘Hohes Haus’ in 2002 has explicitly rejected these estimates,
however, without providing precise figures. His own estimate was a share of EU-induced
legislation of well below 50 percent. Note that such wild guessing is by no means confined to
Austria. In Germany, a country that has many political and legal aspects in common with
Austria, the former Federal President Roman Herzog, once law professor and president of the
Constitutional Court, claimed that 80 percent of the German law would be based on EU law.
In making this claim he drew on the answer to a parliamentary question by the Minister of
Justice, which, however, was based on dubious assumptions (Plehwe 2007). Thus, we know
very little about to what extent the EU impacts on the rules governing its member states. This
is a highly relevant political question that, in turn, relates to issues such as the current degree
of policy coordination, the potential for further integration, the popular response to ‘Europe’
and the relevant party political strategies. Although a simple question, providing answers
requires methodological consciousness and painstaking empirical research.
The different estimates of insiders referred to above need not necessarily conflict.
Rather they may reflect the time of making these estimates and the ups and downs in the
regulatory output of the European Union. Thus it is well known that the EU produced fewer
directives for some years after the completion of the Single Market program (Pollack 2000,
529–37; Dehousse 2002), but it has risen again in the 1990s (see Figure 1 below). Also no
attempt has been made to operationalize ‘EU-induced’ properly. Is a domestic law EUinduced only when it is exclusively devoted to the implementation of EU directives? Or,
conversely, is a law EU-induced if it has any function of adaptation to EU rules? Obviously,
such definitional issues can account for great variation in the number of EU-induced laws at
the national level.
This article makes four contributions, two descriptive, one methodological, and one
theoretical. Descriptively, it shows the Europeanization of both Austrian legislation since
1992 and the country’s legal order. Two factors make Austria an interesting case. First, given
the scarcity of research along these lines any national study is interesting. Second, as a
latecomer to the European integration process Austria (like the two Nordic countries joining
simultaneously) had to cope with more European demands on legal adaptation than earlier
joiners. While this is likely to affect the substance of legislation (as it requires adaptation to
rules in the making of which the new member state did not participate) we can expect even
greater effects with regard to the process and methods of implementation. 1 In that respect the
1
Of course, market pressures and learning from other countries, in particular Germany, always have kept most
of the Austrian rules largely in tune with European developments (e.g. Stadler 1991; Will 1991).
3
Austrian case should be relevant as a baseline for comparison for the even greater challenge
faced by the new member states joining in 2004 and 2007. In short, the Austrian case should
be in the category of most similar cases with regard to the mode of adapting the national legal
framework to EU membership (and it is the only one within the 1995 class of latecomers that
has been researched).
The methodological contribution relates to the various measures of legal
Europeanization and their consequences for the results. Ideal-typically legal Europeanization
means that national legal orders are subjected to uniform pressures for adaptation to common
European standards with regard to the what and how of regulation. Yet, there are different
plausible ways of how to operationally define legal Europeanization. In this article we show
that the choice of definition has a major impact on the result.
Theoretically, the article identifies a few characteristics of the Austrian case and
hypotheses how these may affect the measured impact of the EU on the legal order of member
states. Specifically, we expect that political controversy, federalism, and legal tradition impact
on the methods of transposition while federalism and legal culture impact on the measured
degree of legal Europeanization. Clearly, given the largely uniform impulses – EU regulation
– variation between member states and levels of government must result from differences in
the national legal and political orders and processes. Yet, it may be such differences that make
the EU appear more or less legitimate and influence the countries’ transposition and
implementation records (cf. Haverland and Romeijn 2007).
Of course, teasing out the effects of such factors would require a genuine comparative
research design and more cases. Yet, the demanding data requirements both in terms of
quantity and quality make this a daunting task. Developing a comparative research design for
the question of legal Europeanization is not trivial and careful country studies can be of great
help on that way. They allow exploring the complexity of the cases and hence help avoiding
premature generalizations from the analysis of easy to access data (e.g. the Eur-Lex database).
While hypotheses testing will remain a task for future research, a case study can make
hypotheses plausible and hence justify the collection of the data required for their testing in
comparative research designs.
We begin by first lining out the political framework of legal Europeanization in
Austria. From there we also formulate theoretical expectations. Next, we address the
Europeanization of law-making, that is the impact of EU membership on the national laws
passed immediately before accession and since then. We then turn to the accumulated effect
of the EU on the Austrian legal order. In the Conclusion we summarize the main results.
4
2. Transposition: Politics and Legal Framework
Political controversy of European integration
Austrian EU membership was not uncontested, and the two-thirds majority in its favour in the
1994 referendum came as a surprise. Today Austria has one of the most Euro-sceptical
electorates among the member states and the European integration dimension is relevant to
party politics. At the same time, the Austrian parliament has ensured that its position in the
European decision-making process is stronger than that of any other parliament (Bergman
1997; Maurer and Wessels 2001). Yet, in practice its direct impact has remained rather
limited as the government–opposition divide dominated over the legislative–executive divide
with the government majorities being able to maintain coherence (Müller 2000; Müller et al.
2001; Blümel and Neuhold 2001; Hegeland and Neuhold 2002; Neisser 2002; Pollak and
Slominski 2003). In the period covered in this article two types of government were in office,
initially a ‘grand coalition’ government of the Social Democrats (SPÖ) and People’s Party
ÖVP that was replaced by a coalition of the ÖVP and Freedom Party (FPÖ) in 2000
(continued as an ÖVP-BZÖ cabinet after the FPÖ split in 2005). While the ÖVP and SPÖ
engineered EU membership, the FPÖ opposed it and has transformed itself into an
increasingly Eurosceptical party. Given the parliament’s unwillingness to make much out of
its vast powers to steer EU policy and the solid pro-EU majority therein, there is not much
genuine political incentive for the government to use secondary legislation and thereby
bypassing parliament. Conversely, the government participation of Eurosceptical parties (the
FPÖ and its 2005 breakaway, the BZÖ – the Alliance for Austria’s Future) has provided the
mainstream parties with an incentive to maintain the transposition of EU rules in the hands of
the parliament (rather than handing them over to individual cabinet ministers who may belong
to Eurosceptic parties). The background to this expectation is that neither the Chancellor nor
the cabinet have the formal right to give orders to individual ministers and although the
Chancellor (and the minister’s party) can, in principle, exercise political pressure this is not
always feasible. We hence expect that parliament plays a significant role in the transposition
of EU rules.
Federalism
5
Austria is a federal state, comprising nine Länder. Everything else equal, federal countries
should have fewer rules at the federal level than unitary states and fewer EU rules should
affect the federation’s jurisdiction. Provided that it is those tasks that are delegated to the
federation that can be better served by centralization, we should also expect the federal level
to be more affected by Europeanization than the state (Land) level. Delegating tasks of the
federation to the EU would only mean to carry the economy-of-scales idea underlying
centralization one step further. Yet, concern for national sovereignty should weigh-in more
heavily than concern for regional autonomy and the optimal level of centralization may not
always be the highest one. Notwithstanding these caveats we expect that in federal states the
federal level is more affected by legal Europeanization than the state level.
Although the Austrian Constitution has reserved the power to decide on all matters not
explicitly given to the federation (Bund) for the Länder, their jurisdiction is very limited. The
legislative power of the Länder is unconstrained with regard to area planning and related
issues, tourism, nature protection, agriculture and forestry, hunting and fishing, sports, youth
protection, and pre-school education. With regard to some more domains, including public
welfare assistance, hospitals, land reform, and electricity production and supply, the Länder
have the power to fill in details on the basis of national framework legislation (Fallend 2006,
1029). All the rest is the exclusive jurisdiction of the federation. Most national policies,
however, are to be implemented by the Land administrations. Yet, the rule of law (see below)
leaves them marginal leeway only.
Legal tradition
Austria is a civil law country, meaning that legislation is the primary source of law and courts
decide cases by identifying the general principles underlying the specific case (rather than
drawing on preceding cases, as in the case law tradition). Yet, the civil law countries are not a
homogeneous group but fall into three distinct categories: the French, German, and
Scandinavian traditions (Merryman 1969; Hausmaninger 2003). Austria belongs to the
German tradition and indeed has contributed much to the legal positivism that is prevalent
there with the writings and political impact of Hans Kelsen, the main author of its 1920
constitution. Article 18 of the Constitution demands that all acts of the public administration
must be based on law. In simple words the legality principle of Article 18 means that all
relevant contents of regulations need to take law form. The addressee of legal norms must be
able to learn everything that is important to his or her position under the law from
parliamentary legislation. Likewise, the law courts must be able to check administrative acts
6
against the law (Antoniolli and Koja 1986, 215–9, 141–64; Adamovich et al. 1998, 114). This
leaves little room for delegated legislation for the purpose of introducing new norms. The
major exceptions from this rule are specific empowerments of the administration by
constitutional law (Antoniolli and Koja 1986, 153). Yet, enacting constitutional law requires a
two-thirds majority in parliament and hence depends on building broad political consensus.
While other civil law countries would refer to the same principles, nowhere they seem
to have been taken as literal as in the Austro-German tradition. This may be largely due to
constitutional review that in its European variety was invented in Austria (by Kelsen). In any
case, the Austrian Constitutional Court traditionally has enforced Article 18 rigorously. The
Court’s rulings and the training of law students who fill the ranks of bureaucracy in strict
legal positivism have certainly helped to largely uphold the intent of the Constitution over the
post-war period.
Notwithstanding what just had been said, in recent years the Constitutional Court has
increasingly accepted legislation that contains ‘final’ goals to be achieved by administrative
action rather than detailed prescription of administrative action. Yet, constitutional lawyers
agree that it is hard to predict what passes a testing by the Constitutional Court and what gets
invalidated. Indeed, Article 18 figured prominently in the discussions of the Constitutional
Convention aiming at a fundamental overhaul of the Austrian constitution in 2003–5. The
government aimed at leaving it to parliament whether laws would carry all details or whether
the administration would be empowered to fill-in substance by issuing decrees. The
transpositions of very detailed EU rules figured prominently in making the case for a greater
amount of delegation to the executive. Yet, the opposition considered this proposal as a carte
blanche for government by decree and consequently rejected it. 2 The Constitutional
Convention was also concerned with the government proposal of at least exempting those
directives from the need for parliamentary legislation that already had been scrutinized by
parliament in the ‘upstream’ process. Again, this idea was rejected. 3 Thus, legal positivism
and conditional (rather than final) steering remain the dominant features of legislation, while
the leeway for delegated legislation remains narrowly constrained and not always predictable
when rules are put to a test by the Constitutional Court.
Delegated legislation comes in the form of government decrees (Verordnungen). The
relevant law spells out who is in charge for issuing decrees. Decree power mostly falls in the
2
Note that this proposal would de facto have left it to the major government party, the pro-EU ÖVP, when it
would have employed detailed legislation in a pro-EU parliament (e.g. when otherwise a minister of its
Eurosceptic coalition partner would have been in charge of the transposition) and when secondary legislation
would have been sufficient (e.g. when an ÖVP minister was in charge).
3
See the Final Report of the Constitutional Convention, Part 3, pp. 78–9.
7
jurisdiction of individual government ministries, though the requirement of two or more
government departments having to agree occurs relatively frequently. Occasionally, even the
entire cabinet is entrusted with issuing government decrees. Yet, there is no hierarchy
between the government decrees issued by the cabinet and those of individual ministers, as
there is no hierarchy between various forms of constitutional laws. 4
Article 18 has, over the decades, helped weaving a dense web of detailed laws. This
pattern of regulation bears the consequence that a considerable part of legislation must be
devoted to the more or less regular ‘updating’ of existing laws. This includes minute textual
revisions that do not exhibit any policy change. Technically, legal change often takes the form
of omnibus laws that list the revisions of a number of existing laws in response to some
common cause.
The features of Austria’s legal tradition outlined here suggest that much transposition
will take the form of parliamentary legislation. The complexity of the legal order suggests that
different measures of its Europeanization are likely to lead to different results.
The formal transposition process
All of the extensive participation rights and special procedures that make the Austrian
parliament formally the most powerfull in EU affairs of all member states relate to the
upstream process of making rules in the EU (i.e. to the time before the EU bodies decide). In
contrast, the downstream process – the transposition of EU rules into the national legal order
– has not led to formal institutional adaptation (except intra-government centralization in
2003; see below). The legal requirements for the transposition of EU directives into the
Austrian legal order are largely identical to national regulations that would carry the same
regulatory content. The major exception is the fact that the rule-making process cannot end
with a non-decision (i.e. the decision to maintain the status quo) without violating EU
obligations.
EU directives can be implemented by constitutional laws, laws, and government
decrees (Verordnungen). What type of legal instrument is required is decided on a case-bycase basis. According to the Constitution, the choice of the legal instrument should be exactly
the same for EU-induced regulation as for regulation exclusively triggered by domestic
concerns.
4
Constitutional law comprises the Constitution in the narrow sense (the Bundes-Verfassungsgesetz), separate
constitutional laws, and constitutional clauses in ordinary legislation. All have the same status. Only
constitutional principles that must be derived from constitutional law by interpretation enjoy a superior status.
8
A new directive hence may require the enactment of a new law. This is certainly the
case if the subject matter addressed by the relevant European directive is currently
unregulated nationally. If there is already a specific law, several alternatives exist. First, the
law (or laws plus further decree regulation) may already contain what is in the European
directive. In such cases no further domestic action is required (though the relevant laws and
decrees need to be notified to the European Commission and a technical reference to the EU
directive needs to be incorporated in the already existing domestic legal acts). Second, if the
law or even the Constitution contain regulations that conflict with those of the EU directive,
amendments of the laws and/or the Constitution are required. Third, if a law exists that does
neither conflict with nor exhaust the relevant EU directive decree regulation may be sufficient
for transposing the directive’s uncovered contents. Yet, for that purpose it is required that the
law provides for decree regulation and empowers the relevant minister. If such empowerment
is not already contained in the law it needs to be introduced in order to ensure that the
executive can decide on the substantive issues. Wherever frequent technical changes in EU
directives (mostly in their appendices) are anticipated, the general strategy is indeed to
empower the relevant minister so that future (technical) changes in the European rules can be
transposed by the means of government decrees.
The national division of tasks, as laid down in the Constitution and the Federal
Ministries Law, establishes responsibilities for the implementation of EU directives.
Experience has taught that being obliged to transpose newly enacted EU law is not sufficient
to make individual ministries or Länder act. Hence, the 2003 amendment to the Federal
Ministries Law (that was introduced in the context of the formation of the second ÖVP-FPÖ
cabinet, Schüssel II), has introduced a new coordination competence for the Federal
Chancellery. Based on this formal task, the Chancellery now takes an active part in
establishing the domestic responsibilities for transposition and monitoring that process.
Austria is a full EU member since 1995. Yet, Europeanization of legislation does not
begin with formal membership. Rather, formal membership requires that most adaptations to
the acquis communautaire have already been made. We therefore begin our empirical enquiry
of EU effects with 1992. This was the year when the EEA Treaty was ratified and hence
large-scale adaptation to EU norms went into full steam. Note that special rules applied for
the transition period, when Austria participated in the EEA but was not yet a full EU member.
The EEA Treaty was signed in May 1992 and ratified by the Austrian parliament in
September 1992. EEA accession originally had been planned for January 1993, but eventually
did not occur before 1994. Membership in the EEA not only required the ratification of the
9
EEA Treaty but also the transposition of the relevant body of existing EU law (i.e. the
complete first pillar of EU legislation dealing with the ‘four freedoms’ – the free movement
of goods, persons, services, and capital). According to an estimate by the head of the Federal
Chancellery’s Constitutional Service department about 60 percent of the secondary EU law
had to be implemented at that stage (Okresek 1998). Generally, national laws were seen as the
appropriate means for the transposition of EU directives. Yet, the same constitutional law
(Bundesgesetzblatt 115/1993) that subscribed to the principle of using parliamentary
legislation opened a window for the use of delegated legislation. Provided that the newly
created EEA Joint Committee had adopted EU directives and that these directives were
sufficiently detailed (hence matching what was expected from a national law), the federal and
Land governments were empowered to transpose these rules (Hummer 1994). Thus, in the
EEA period before full membership Austria had more permissive rules for transposition than
in the membership period.
3. Europeanization of Law-Making
Measuring legal Europeanization
We identify EU-related norms by drawing on both national and EU sources. For each of our
EU-related national norms one or more of the following characteristics apply: (1) a specific
reference to EU rules in the introductory or final clause of the law; (2) a reference to the
CELEX number in the head information of the law when published in the official law gazette
(Bundesgesetzblatt) (which is also available in electronic form at the law information system
of the Federal Chancellery, RIS); (3) national authorities’ data indicating that the respective
law implements EU rules and has been reported to the Commission; (4) a reference to the
need to conform to EU rules in the official materials accompanying government bills when
they are introduced to parliament (Erläuternde Bemerkungen) (as suggested by Page 1998,
804–5); (5) information extracted from the parliamentary debates; (6) data from the Eur-Lex
database (sector 7). We have decided for such a broad strategy of data collection as, for
various reasons, no single source is perfect. Nor are the individual sources equally reliable for
each period. At the national level reporting on implementation measures was largely left to
the individual government department in the early period. This allowed different ministries
adopting different strategies, leading to inconsistencies in the reporting and caused some
problems with regard to Austria’s transposition record. In 2003 a change of the jurisdictions
10
of the government departments put the Federal Chancellery in charge of coordinating the
implementation of EU directives and the reporting of the implementation measures
(Bundesgesetzblatt 17/2003). The Vienna data come from the Land official law gazette, EurLex, and from information kindly provided by the Vienna political documentation
department. For the other Länder we draw on a recent study (Bussjäger and Larch 2004).
Scope of Europeanization
Figure 1 provides a long-term perspective. It shows the annual law production at the federal
level since 1945 and the number of European directives published since the Treaty of Rome.
The average number of new federal laws in the statute books per year is 120 for the period
1945–2003 with a low of 54 in 1953 and a high of 191 in 1993. The number of EU directives
increased until 1992. New enactments declined temporarily before reaching a new high point
at the end of our observation period. If there would be a 1:1 relationship between EU
directives and national laws, Austrian law production would have to be increased dramatically
at the early 1990s, simply to adapt to the EU rules accumulated since the early 1960s. And if
EU rules would come on top of national laws, the level of law production would be
substantially higher in the membership period than before as the annual number of EU
directives is not much below what used to be the long-term Austrian standard of new
(domestic) legislation. Figure 1 shows that this is not the case. Although the preparation and
membership period contains the two years with the highest annual number of newly enacted
laws, the number of legislative acts did not dramatically increase when Austria approached
and joined the EU.
Figure 1 ABOUT HERE
Figure 1 also displays the number of laws at the national level bearing a relationship to
EU law. We will qualify this relationship below. Here we point out that the highest share of
EU-related laws was 45 percent in 1993. This is far below the 80 percent level generally
associated with Delors and the related estimates of most Austrian politicians. Yet, 1993 was
an extraordinary year – the year with the most legislative acts in modern Austrian history. The
average yearly share of EU-related federal laws was 27.6 percent in the 1992–2003 period. If
we look at the membership period exclusively, the annual average share of EU-related
legislation is slightly below 25 percent (1995–2003).
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Figure 2 ABOUT HERE
Figure 2 is more comprehensive with regard to the means of transposition as it also
contains delegated legislation in the form of federal decrees. In our observation period the
number of published decrees varied between a low of 275 in 1985 and a high of 602 in 1994.
In each year the number of decrees exceeded that of laws by several times. Measured over the
period 1983–2003 the relation in the number of federal decrees to federal laws is 3.1:1. It has
slightly risen to 3.2:1 for the membership period (1995–July 2003). Yet, only a marginal
share of government decrees is EU-related. Nevertheless, government decrees outnumber
laws as the means of transposition of EU regulations in all but the first two years of our time
series. The peak in EU-related decrees lagged the peak in EU-related laws by a year. This
delay may reflect the constitutional need for the delegation of specific legislative powers to
the government (by legislation) as a precondition for transposition by decree.
Table 1 ABOUT HERE
Table 1 includes all laws and government decrees published in the official law gazette
from January 1992 until 1 July 2003 divided into two periods. A total of 1689 laws were
passed in the 1992–2003 period, 25.9 percent of which are EU-related. The number of laws is
belittled by 5337 government decrees and, as we have already seen in Figure 2, there are also
more EU-related government decrees than laws. Yet, while the laws/government decrees ratio
in general is 1:3.1, it is only 1:1.4 with regard to EU-related rules. Given Austria’s emphasis
on legal positivism this is what we have expected.
In Table 1 we distinguish between the pre-accession period and the membership
period. In the process of making the Austrian legal order fit for EU membership the mean
number of EU-related laws passed by year was 61, in the membership period it was 30. While
the share of EU-related laws considerably dropped after the catching-up process, the share of
EU-related government decrees has remained at roughly the same level.
As Austria is a federal state we also include the law production at the Land level. We
can draw on data for four of the nine Länder, though it is only for Vienna that we have data
for the pre-membership period. As Table 1 shows, law production at the Land level is by far
less frequent than national legislation. This reflects the imbalanced nature of Austrian
federalism (see above). As expected, the Land level is less affected by Europeanization than
the federal level. This can be seen from each of the pairs of corresponding table entries.
12
Forms of legal Europeanization
Table 2 provides some basic information about the correspondence of legal instruments at the
EU and national levels for the period of Austria’s membership. Proceeding from both the laws
and decrees that were identified as EU-related we have coded each of them into a single
category of EU rules. In the case of more than one EU instrument relating to the Austrian law
or decree, we have coded the one highest in hierarchy.
Clearly, the bulk of Austrian EU-related legal acts relate to specific EU directives. EU
directives trigger both laws and decrees. Given the constitutional requirements outlined
above, decrees can only be used on the basis of government empowerment through specific
laws and only within rather narrowly drawn limits with regard to their scope. Hence, new EU
rules typically require parliamentary legislation while the transposition of later changes of
these EU rules by government decree is more likely.
Table 2 ABOUT HERE
Although EU regulations are directly binding, they can still trigger some national rule
making. Often EU regulations trigger the adaptation of rules instructing the national
administration. For this purpose government decrees are much more frequent than laws. Even
decisions by the EU Commission occasionally require changes of the national rules.
Typically, these rules are again ‘internal’ ones, governing administrative procedures.
The final row in Table 2 mainly contains responses to EU primary law. The most
obvious cases are constitutional laws incorporating the Nizza and Amsterdam Treaties and the
Treaty on EU Enlargement. The bulk of cases in this category, however, are changes of
specific national rules that conflicted with the principles of EU primary law. To provide one
prominent example: before membership the Austrian agricultural sector was governed by a
number of laws regulating the markets for specific groups of products (milk, wheat, etc.).
Collectively, these laws were referred to as ‘the laws governing the market’ for agricultural
commodities (Marktordnungsgesetze). These laws were incompatible with the Common
Agricultural Policy (CAP) and were therefore terminated with the beginning of EU
membership. The ‘other EU rules’ in this category are a few cases only which all date from
the first years of our observation period where national rules were made in order to comply
with EU regulations and decisions.
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Depth of Europeanization
Thus far we have established relationships between individual national and EU norms and
have presented the relevant counts. Yet, we do not know the quality of this relationship. Is the
national norm exclusively devoted to transposing EU rules? Or, alternatively, is the need to
transpose new EU rules just one of several ‘birds’ to be ‘killed’ with one ‘stone’ (i.e. new
national legal measure)? And if the second option applies, what is the impact of EU demands
relative to national policy objectives?
Table 3 ABOUT HERE
Table 3 provides an approximate answer for the EU-related laws enacted since the
beginning of the membership period. Our coding is a combined quantitative-qualitative
measure. The first criterion was the ratio of EU-induced to nationally induced contents in the
law. We have coded a law as predominantly EU-induced provided that EU inputs
outnumbered national ones (counting the number of paragraphs in the new law). We have
then scrutinized the contents of the remaining laws. If the EU-induced changes (although
smaller in number) appeared more relevant than the national-induced ones, we have
nevertheless coded the respective law as predominantly EU-induced. Thus, we are loading the
dice in favour of the ‘predominantly EU-induced’ coding. Note that the coding in Table 3
represents educated guesses of policy generalists. We certainly do not fully understand all the
implications of the rules we have coded that would be clear to specialists in the respective
policy domain. Nor can we be sure that we have been able to identify precisely in each case
what is nationally induced and what serves the transposition of EU law. Yet, overall we are
confident that our coding provides a reasonable approximation to the EU-relatedness of the
Austrian laws passed since 1995.
A considerable share of EU-related laws (41 percent) is (almost) exclusively due to
regulatory demands from EU membership. The majority of laws have a ‘mixed’ origin,
however, including both EU-induced and nationally induced changes. For reasons of
administrative efficiency, legal parsimony (keep number of amendment as low as possible),
and scarcity of parliamentary time most laws that transpose EU regulations also introduce
legal reforms that are not caused by the EU. We have broken down this group of laws with
mixed origin in two categories in Table 3. About half of these laws exhibit predominantly
14
EU-induced changes, the other half predominantly nationally induced ones. In the overall
picture, however, 69 percent of the EU-related laws are predominantly triggered by
harmonization demands from the EU. Thus, within the class of EU-related laws
Europeanization is indeed the driving force of making laws.
4. Europeanization of the Austrian Legal Order
Thus far we have looked at the process of Europeanizing legislation in the immediate premembership and membership periods. We now turn to the question to what this amounts with
respect to Austria’s legal order. Table 4 provides the global view. In mid-2003 the Austrian
legal order contained about 4100 federal laws and older legal norms of equal standing and
marginally more government decrees. Our count is based on the official list of valid norms in
the Index 2004 (Bundeskanzleramt 2004). The Index is published annually by the Federal
Chancellery. Specifically, we used the Index 2004, which documents the legal order as of 1st
January 2004, and deleted the rules published between August and December 2003. In the
case of republications of rules that consolidate many amendments we counted the number of
their components. Our count includes about 40 cross-level agreements between the federation
(Bund) and one or more of the Länder that can be considered as the functional equivalent of
constitutional laws or ordinary laws. Based on the sources mentioned above, we have then
again identified EU-related norms.
Table 4 ABOUT HERE
Table 4 presents an estimate of the quantitative impact of the EU on Austrian
legislation in force. The classification of policy areas follows the Austrian standard legal
classification. However, we have moved some sub-categories of civil law to economic law.
Specifically, we have included the 61 laws regulating industrial competition, brand names,
and patents and 144 acts of trade and company law into the ‘Economic law’ category. Given
that some laws have multiple codes in the Index we have not just added our counts but
checked for each law whether it was already included in the ‘Economic law’ category. The
net addition was 138 laws.
According to Table 4 slightly more than ten percent of the laws in force and about 14
percent of the government decrees in force are EU-related. Putting laws and decrees in one
15
basket, the degree of Europeanization is 12.4 percent. For obvious reasons this is considerable
less than the share of EU-related legislation in the immediate pre-membership and
membership periods. This suggests that the way from the Europeanization of law-making to
the Europeanization of the national legal order will be a long one.
Table 4 also provides some insights into differences between policy sectors and the
relevance of laws and government decrees, respectively. It comes as no surprise that overall
the body of agricultural and environmental rules is the most Europeanized. It is followed by
the sector comprising transport and technology and economic law. The ratio between laws
and government decrees varies between the sectors. Generally, the sectors listed in the upper
part of Table 4 tend to have more decrees than laws and those in the lower part vice versa.
With regard to constitutional and institutional issues and education and related fields we find
that EU-related rules display a much higher share of laws compared to that ratio among all
rules. Generally, decrees are more used in the more unionized policy areas. As mentioned
above, it had been the deliberate strategy of the (then grand coalition government) to seek
general empowerment of the ministers in those fields, particularly agriculture, to issue decrees
in the transposition of EU rules which are subject to frequent changes of a more technical
nature.
Methods of transposition
Table 5 proceeds from the EU directives. Each directive published between 1992 and 2000 is
classified according to the EU decision rules applied. We use 2000 as a cut-off point for
directives in order to allow for appropriate time for their transposition. The entries in Table 5
are the corresponding transposition measures. When it took three laws or one law and two
decrees to transpose one directive, we have counted all three national legal acts. However, we
record at least one national legal act per directive. Hence, when one law transposes three
directives, we count a total of three national legal acts (which may fall in three different
rows).
Table 5 ABOUT HERE
Table 5 sheds some light on the parliament’s involvement in the transposition process
and the relationship between decision procedures at the EU level and the national level.
Decisions that involve the Council and the European Parliament are much more likely to lead
to transposition by law than EU directives enacted by the Commission. The latter are largely
of technical nature and many of them are from the agriculture sector.
16
14.9 percent of the EU directives that were published in this period did not show up
either in the Eur-Lex database nor in the various national sources that we have consulted. This
percentage seems quite high. However, this group of directives is diverse and the possible
reasons for not finding any national citations also: A few directives did not apply to Austria,
but to a single or several other EU member countries only. Other directives did not necessitate
any national transposition measures as they simply extended the period of validity of an
existing directive. In one case the directive was extremely short-lived and replaced by a new
one before transposition. Three directives were transposed by administrative measures only,
i.e. publication in an official administrative journal. Another important reason is our cut-off
point for the national measures in July 2003. A considerable number of the most recent
directives were transposed after that date. Yet, the majority of the missing cases result from
missing information in the Eur-Lex database and could not be located in the national sources
we have consulted.
Europeanization in a federal order
Table 6 again proceeds from the individual directives published in the 1992–2000 period.
Each directive is represented by the type of norm or the combination of norms employed for
its transposition. Each of the 727 directives is recorded in one and one only of the three main
categories and nine sub-categories. Table 6 hence does not reveal the number of Austrian
national norms (as a single directive can relate to several domestic instruments or, conversely,
several directives can be transposed by a single instrument).
Table 6 ABOUT HERE
Table 6 shows that the federal level is clearly dominant in the transposition of EU
directives. 92 percent of the directives were transposed exclusively by federal level norms.
Less than three percent of the directives were dealt with by Land level norms exclusively.
Even including the mixed cases the overall involvement of the Länder is quite marginal. This
is strong support for the hypothesis derived from the general nature of federalism and the
specific features of the Austrian variant.
Europeanization and original laws
Working with Eur-Lex data on the national implementation measures and national
transposition data we found a considerable number of entries of laws from the pre-1992
17
period, some of them even from the Habsburg monarchy (before 1918). The logic of reporting
these laws predating EU regulation as implementation measures is that they already contain
(some of) the contents later included in EU rules. This brought up two points of
methodological concern: (1) whether these older laws indeed should be seen as EU-related
and (2) how to maintain consistency in our data collection. The consistency problem stems
from the facts that reference to such ancient national laws is sometimes more and sometimes
less comprehensive in our sources and that the amendment frequency is greater in some
policy sectors that in others.
We address these problems by tying the final part of our analysis to original laws
(Stammgesetze). Original laws are those pieces of legislation that for the first time regulate a
matter or codify it by fully replacing a complex web of interrelated laws by a single
comprehensive act. More recent regulations relate to original laws as either substantial
amendment laws (Novellen) or small changes (Änderungen). This is reflected in the citation
standard of legal scholars who typically refer to such amendments only by making reference
also to the original law. With regard to original laws the basic assumption ‘a law is a law is a
law’ hence is more justified than with regard to all laws. Some of our data sources do
distinguish between these three forms of laws and list all of them as EU-related. In contrast,
other sources confine themselves to listing only those amendments that were specifically
issued to meet regulatory demand resulting from EU rules. In order to overcome this
inconsistency problem we have again drawn on the official systematic guide to the legal rules
in force, the Index 2004. From this source we traced back all EU-related laws published in the
1992–2003 period to the relevant original laws. Thus, either the laws identified as EU-related
were original laws themselves, or we traced them back to the original laws that were changed
by EU-related amendments. Using this procedure we identified 237 original laws that were
not reported to the EU as transposing EU rules.
Table 7 ABOUT HERE
Table 7 is perhaps the best overall proxy for the Europeanization of the Austrian legal
order we can come up with. It contains all original laws in force and hence excludes latter
amendments and small changes. ‘EU-related’ has two meanings here. One is that an original
law resulted from the need to transpose EU rules. This occurs when the law’s regulatory
content could not be incorporated into the Austrian legal order by amending existing national
legislation. The other meaning is that already existing original laws (or any of their
18
amendments) were reported (and often also amended) as meeting the requirements of the EU.
The substantive meaning of these two forms of EU-relatedness typically is quite different.
Notwithstanding some relevant exceptions, original laws specifically enacted to meet EU
requirements tend to be substantially less important than previously existing original laws that
were amended to conform to EU rules.
In Table 7 we distinguish three periods: the time before the foundation of what
eventually became the EU, the period before Austria ratified the EEA Treaty, and the time
since 1992 (i.e. the transposition period). Overall, about 40 percent of the original laws in
force in mid-2003 are affected in some way by EU rules (41.8 %). Paradoxically, the share of
EU-related original laws is smallest in the period of preparation for EU membership and the
membership period itself (26.6 %). It is greatest for the period that parallels the preMaastricht development of the EU (82.4 %). This suggests that this measure indeed captures
the Europeanization of substantive pieces of legislation rather than ad hoc legislation in the
transition period.
Yet, the question remains whether the pre-1992 laws should be seen as EU-related.
Clearly, they are not in the same way EU-related as the laws passed in reaction to specific
changes of EU law, or in their anticipation. However, the 406 original laws identified by
tracing EU-related amendments to the relevant original law offer another glimpse of the true
extent of the Europeanization of the national legal order that is not reflected in the numbers
given in Table 1. To some extent this may reflect the ‘autonomous’ Austrian reactions to
developments in the EU, its largest export market, and hence market-driven legal
Europanization or learning from neighbours. Beyond these factors, we can understand such
communalities as reflecting a common European legal heritage. Yet, converting this heritage
in formal EU rules means that the national leeway to change ancient rules in the future is
constrained. The relevant paragraphs of a law reported to the Commission as fulfilling a
transposition requirement are subject to national decision-making only within the confines set
by EU law. It is this backward binding of the national legal order that is illustrated in Table 7.
As most government decrees are much more short-lived, this effect is practically confined to
laws.
Table 8 ABOUT HERE
Finally, we take a look at sector differences (Table 8). Applying the same categories as
used in Table 4 we find a significant higher degree of Europeanization in all sectors if we
19
focus on original laws. The overall share of original laws affected by Europeanization is 42.6
percent. It is highest in Agriculture and related fields (52.7 %), followed by Labour law and
social security, and the category combining Transport with other technical categories. In no
sector the degree of Europeanization is below 20 percent. If we combine policy areas 1, 2, 3,
6, and 7, that might be labelled ‘economic and social legislation’ (i.e. Delors’ claim) we find
461 original laws that are affected by Europeanization. This is 36.3 percent of the relevant
laws. This is a substantial share, but a far cry from the 80 percent predicted by Delors and
taken as a fact by so many political actors.
5. Conclusion
This article is one of the first attempts at studying legal Europeanization and the first one with
regard to Austria. As a 1995 accession country, Austria faced the acquis communautaire as it
had accumulated over more than three decades, including the single-market programme. A
latecomer certainly faces greater need for adaptation than countries that participated from the
beginning or significantly longer in the process of EU regulation. The late accession date
distinguishes Austria from all Western member states except Finland and Sweden (and later
the mini-states Malta and Cyprus). Austria is a federal system and belongs to the German civil
law tradition with strong legal positivism. Both features would lead us to expect more
regulation and more EU-related regulation than in unitary countries with a different (more
pragmatic) legal tradition. From federalism in general and its specific Austrian variant we
have derived the expectations that the federation will be relatively more affected by legal
Europanization than the states and that in absolute terms transposition by federal acts will
clearly dominate Land acts. Finally, Austria is also a country with one of the most
Eurosceptic electorates and party political contestation of European integration plus a strong
formal role of parliament in EU affairs, what again has generated the expectation of much
transposition by parliamentary legislation. While we have found all these expectations
confirmed, the limits of a case study are all too obvious for the purpose of proper hypothesis
testing, particularly when multiple causes are expected to have similar effects.
Methodologically, the article has demonstrated that different measures of legal
Europeanization have a major impact on the result of our empirical enquiry and hence lead to
different substantive interpretations. We have first addressed the impact of EU membership
on current rule-making, meaning legislation and delegated legislation enacted since Austria
20
approached the EU. The country’s positivist legal culture manifests itself in a share of laws
among EU-related norms that is relatively high compared to other member states (XXXX;
YYYY). As a relative late-comer to the EU, Austria faced a substantial acquis
communautaire that needed to be adopted before membership. It is, therefore not astonishing
that EU-related laws constituted a greater share of legislation in the immediate premembership period than in any year thereafter. The share of EU-related legislation peaked at
45 % before membership. The annual average of the membership period is almost 25 percent.
EU-related rules constitute a much smaller share of delegated legislation – about 11 percent.
All this is a far cry from Delors’ 80 percent prediction that has to a large extent shaped the
perception of political actors in Austria and elsewhere. The gross figures of new enactments
suggest that EU-membership has slightly increased the amount of legislation, but clearly EUrelated legislation does not come on top of the traditional level of national legislation. Indeed,
the majority of laws classified as ‘EU-related’ do not contain EU rules exclusively but also
norms of domestic origin.
Europeanizing legislation, of course, over time should lead to the Europeanization of
the legal order. This effect is what constitutes the core of Delors’ statement. Our check on the
Austrian legal order for mid-2003 shows that one out of ten laws in force and 1.4 out of ten
government decrees are EU-related. Of course, policy areas differ widely, but nowhere the
share of EU-related norms is much above a quarter (laws) or a third (decrees). Again, this
suggests that the expectations about legal Europeanization were considerably exaggerated.
Yet, the Austrian legal order is a very diverse universe, comprising landmark legislation and
politically irrelevant pieces, comprehensive laws and minute revisions. We have therefore
introduced another measure: original laws (i.e. laws regulating a topic for the first time or in a
codified form). Collectively, the 1551 original laws constitute the core of the Austrian legal
order. 42 percent of the original laws are affected by EU rules. Again, we have found
important differences between policy areas. Predictably, a sector including agriculture, health,
and environment has the greatest share of EU-related original laws: 53 percent. Other ‘usual
suspects’ – including labour law and transport – have shares well above 40 percent and none
is below 21 percent. Of course, the lumping together of more specific policy areas in large
sectors in our sources affects our results. Yet, our research suggests that Europeanization,
while missing some inflationed expectations, is indeed a major feature of the Austrian legal
order. We are confident that this also holds true for the other member states.
21
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24
Table 1. Federal laws and decrees related to EU law and/or EU membership (1992–July 2003)
n
Preparation and
EEA Membership
(1992–1994)
EU Membership
(1995–2003)
Total
Federal laws
EU-related
506
182
n
1525
Federal decrees
EU-related
172
%
11.3
451
11.8
623
Land decrees
n
EU-related
98
3
11.7
1183
253
21.4
3812
1689
25.8
5337
72
435
Land laws
EU-related
13
%
18.1
272
56
20.6
283
41
14.5
293
52
18.2
582
26
6.0
344
69
20.1
381
44
11.5
n
Preparation and
EEA Membership
(1992–1994)
Vienna
EU Membership
(1995–2003)
Vienna
EU Membership
(1995–2003) four
Länder
Total, Vienna
%
35.9
%
3.1
Notes:
Period refers to year of publication in the official law gazette.
The four Länder are Salzburg, Tyrol, Upper Austria, and Vienna. The table reports means.
Sources: Austrian Legal Information System (www.ris.bka.gv.at/bgbl), Bußjäger and Larch (2004, 6) and own
data.
Table 2. Type of EU input for Austrian EU-related federal laws and decrees (1995–July 2003)
Federal Laws
N
Directives
Regulations
Decisions
Primary law and other EU rules
N
%
218
11
5
24
253
86.2
4.3
2.0
9.5
100.0
Federal Decrees
N
%
390
86.5
52
11.5
20
4.4
2
0.4
451
100.0
Note: Authors’ calculations based on Eur-Lex database and national sources. Three directives are not contained
in Table 2 as unconventional means of transposition were used. Directive 31992L0060, for instance, was
transposed exclusively through an announcement in a special issue of the Amtliche Veterinärnachrichten
(No.11a, 29 Dec. 1994). This was one of the many changes of the directive 90/425/EEC regulating veterinary
checks of living stock in intra-Union trade. The same applies to directive 31992L0067. European Court of
Justice rulings on the appropriateness of EU directives’ transpositions that have led to changes in Austrian rules
have been coded into the category ‘EU directives’.
Table 3. The degree of Europeanization of EU-related federal laws (1995–July 2003)
Legislative acts
(Almost) exclusively EU-induced
Predominantly EU-induced
Predominantly nationally induced
N
N
%
105
69
79
253
41.5
27.3
31.2
100
25
Table 4. The Austrian federal legal order in July 2003*
Class.
No.
Policy area
Federal laws
N
8
9
5
7
4
6
3
2
1
Agriculture and
Forestry, Veterinary
Law, Health,
Environmental
Protection
Transport, Technology,
Building, Public
Procurement
Economic law
Education, Science,
Religion, Culture,
Sports
Administration law and
military affairs
Labour law, social
security
Banking and Monetary
law
Civil law and Criminal
law
Constitution law and
institutional law,
media law
Total, multiple codings
excluded
Federal decrees
378
EU-related
(Jan 1992–
July 2003)
96
EUrelated
in %
25.4
372
81
386
312
N
923
EU-related
(Jan 1992–July
2003)
341
EUrelated
in %
36.9
21.8
449
123
27.4
48
22
12.4
7.1
612
751
85
3
13.9
0.4
213
14
6.6
257
13
5.1
1091
70
6.4
728
25
3.4
720
42
5.8
305
16
5.2
704
36
5.1
209
16
7.7
627
27
4.3
277
2
0.7
4110
435
10.6
4416
623
14.1
Note: *Federal laws published until end of July 2003, numbers include neither EU law nor international law,
multiple counting over policy areas possible.
Source: Authors’ calculations based on the Index 2004.
26
Table 5. Austrian laws and decrees (1992–July 2003) transposing EU directives (published
1992–2000)
Type of
Directive
Council Directives
(n=261)
Council and Parliament
(codecision) Directives
(n=126)
Commission Directives
(n=321)
Transposed directives
(n=708)**
Constitutional
laws
1
Federal laws
with
constitutional
clause(s)
31
-
National norm
‘Normal’
federal laws
Federal
decrees
283
345
Ratio of
federal
decrees to
laws
1.1
19
70
115
1.3
-
17
83
310
3.1
1
67
435
770
1.8
Note: Periods by date of publication in the official law gazette. Multiple counting of national norms occur
frequently.
* Published until end of July 2003
** Numbers referring to type of directive exclude 19 EU directives that were transposed exclusively via Land
level norms. See Table 6.
Table 6. National and sub-national legal norms employed in the transposition of EU directives
(1992–2000) into national norms (1992–July 2003)
Transposition by
Federal level norms
Federal law(s) only
Federal law(s) and decrees
Federal decree(s) only
Federal and Land level norms
Federal law(s) only and Land level norms
Federal law(s) and decree(s) and Land level norms
Federal decree(s) and Land level norms
Land level norms
Land law(s) only
Land law(s) and decree(s)
Land decree(s) only
Number of directives cited
Number of directives published
Number of directives cited
No data available or directive not transposed
N
%
667
156
121
390
91.7
21.5
16.6
53.6
41
8
29
4
5.6
1.1
4.0
0.6
19
6
5
8
727
854
727
127
2.6
0.8
0.7
1.1
100.0
100.0
85.1
14.9
Note: Authors’ calculations based on Eur-Lex database and national sources.
27
Table 7. EU-related original laws (Stammgesetze) in the Austrian legal order (July 2003)
Date of original laws
Until 1956
1957–1991
1992–July 2003
N
Original laws*
n
%
293
347
911
1551
18.9
22.4
58.7
100
EU-related**
n
%
120
286
242
648
Share of
EUrelated
original
laws
40.9
82.4
26.6
41.8
18.5
44.1
37.3
100
Notes:
* Including 31 treaties between the federal state and the Länder.
** Including 2 treaties between the federal state and the Länder.
Table 8. EU-related original laws (Stammgesetze) in the Austrian legal order (July 2003)
according to sector*
Class.
No.
Policy Area
8
Agriculture and Forestry, Veterinary Law, Health,
Environmental Protection
Labour law, social security
Transport, Technology, Building, Public Procurement
Civil law and Criminal law
Economic law
Administration law and military affairs
Constitution law and institutional law, media law
Banking and Monetary law
Education, Science, Religion, Culture, Sports
Total
6
9
2
5
4
1
3
7
Original
federal
laws
EU-related
in %
186
EU-related
original
federal laws
(1992– July
2003)
98
221
175
218
275
134
274
411
121
1520
105
72
76
95
42
62
91
26
646
47.5
41.1
34.9
34.5
31.3
22.6
22.1
21.5
42.5
52.7
Note: *Federal laws published until the end of July 2003, excluding state treaties. Multiple counting of original
laws in several policy areas possible. The final row does not include the multiple counting of rules.
Source: Authors’ calculations based on the Index 2004.
28
Figure 1. National and EU-related legislation
legislative acts
200
150
100
50
0
'45
'55
'65
EU directives published
'75
'85
federal laws published
'95
federal laws related to EU law
Sources: Own data calculated from the Federal Law Gazette and Eur-Lex database.
Figure 2: Number of National and EU-related laws and government decrees
600
500
400
300
200
100
0
'80
'85
'90
'95
'00
federal laws published
federal decrees published
federal laws related to EU law
federal decrees related to EU law
Sources: Own data calculated from the Legal Information System and Eur-Lex database.
29