Europe matters, but in different ways in different countries. The European Union affects the policy fabric of all member states, but that impact is differential rather than convergent. In some instances, new policy goals have been added to national agendas and fresh policy instruments are applied, while old ones become less important or are openly challenged. In other instances, when European and national policy objectives are concurrent, national practices may be reinforced, or even redirected, by EU policies. In all instances, however, state actors reconsider national policy practices wherever the EU extends it activities. This innovative study solves the differential puzzle by developing a sophisticated theoretical and conceptual framework for studying the impact of European policies on member states. Focusing especially on transport policy, the authors employ extensive interviews and archival research in an empirically rich set of case studies (Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands) to demonstrate convincingly that this influence depends on pre-existing policies and institutional capacity to change. Depending on the particular phase of regulation in which a country finds itself and on its institutional flexibility, an identical EU policy has remarkably diverse impacts within individual member states. The authors' research points to fascinating counterintuitive results and a new general model that will have implications for anyone studying policymaking in Europe.

This title was first published in 2001. The question this thesis attempts to answer is summarized as follows: what accounts for the amazing stability of Italian transport policy in the face of European challenges, given the fact that - as most national and European policy-makers readily believe - it is not capable of addressing the problem of the sector? This study analyzes the transport policy in Italy from the 1990s into the 21st century. It looks at how the two sub-sectors of surface transport, road haulage and raliways, have been managed by the public and private actors involved. In both sectors the policy appears to have failed, either by not offering a remedy to problems or by aggravating them further. The author believes that studying transport policy in Italy will shed light on the wider question of how national policy-making patterns are influenced by developments in the international environment; in this case looking closely at the influence of the European Union.