Year: 1995
Type: report
Abstract: As sociologists from Simmel to Luhmann have argued, trust is a basic social mechanism for coping with system complexity.It facilitates cooperation, simplifies transactions and makes available the knowledge and experience of others.Also recent research in game theory and in industrial economics emphasizes the importance of trust, and of the reputation system on which trust is based, for sustaining cooperation in a world of self-interested individuals, and for governing contractual relations more complex than simple spot-market transactions.The significance of mutual trust for a system as complex as the single European market could not have escaped the attention of the drafters of the founding treaties.Article 5 of the Treaty of Rome expresses the requirement of Community loyalty in the following terms: Member States shall take all appropriate measures.whether general or particular, to ensure fulfillment of the obligations arising out of this Treaty or resulting from action taken by the institutions of the Community.They shall facilitate the achievement of the Community's tasks.They shall abstain from any measure which could jeopardize the attairunent of the objectives of this Treaty.Analogous prescriptions are contained in article 86 of the treaty establishing the European Coal and Steel Community, and in article 192 of the Euratom treaty.Mutual trust is clearly crucial for a system which depends on the loyal cooperation of the member states, and of their administrations, for the formulation and implementation of common rules.In fact, the European Court of Justice has interpreted article 5 in a way that.going well beyond the principle of international law that pacta sunt servanda, approaches the principle of Bundestreue or "federal comity" of German constitutional law (Due, 1992;Scharpf, 1994). 2 In the interpretation of the Court, article 5 gives expression to a general principle of mutual trust and cooperation not only between member states and Community institutions, but also among national governments.In the same spirit, the Commission's White Paper on the Completion of the Internal Market (Commission of the European Communities, 1985) lists mutual trust as the first element of the new approach for the mutual recognition of diplomas.Thus, the starting point of this paper --the strategic significance of trust in a system as open-ended and interdependent as the Community --is hardly new.Unfortunately, the current debate on this issue tends to be legalistic, and seems to assume that trust can be elicited by preaching or imposed by judicial fiat.Still lacking are systematic analyses of the cascading effect of distrust on many problematic aspects of the integration process -from excessive centralization and unnecessary uniformity to the paradox of over-regulation and under-implementation --as well as concrete proposals for improving an increasingly unsatisfactory state of affairs.This paper is a first attempt to make some progress in both directions.Much more work remains to be done in preparation of the forthcoming Intergovernmental Conference on institutional reform. Distrust and the paradox of centralizationIf trust is so important in reducing social complexity and sustaining cooperation then its lack must have serious consequences for the evolution of a system like the European Union.In this and the two following sections I
Author: Giandomenico Majone
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2269293482