Competing advocacy coalitions and the process of 'frame reflection': a longitudinal analysis of EU steel policy

Abstract

European Union steel policy offers a particularly good example of how policy ideas in the form of 'policy frames' can be transplanted across national boundaries and into supranational arenas via interests, in the form of advocacy coalitions, and individual policy entrepreneurs. These dynamics of policy change illustrate not only the power of economic and political ideas to influence policy, but also how interests compete to impose their own 'frames' of reality on the policy discourse of the day. The Treaty of Paris, which founded the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951, gave steel policy a firm institutional base, and made it a 'special case' within the European Community. The Paris Treaty embodied Keynesian ideas of countering trade cycles, enabling the institutions of the ECSC to adapt to exogenous changes. Nevertheless, in the 1990s the fashion for free market ideas within the ECSC has caused the Paris Treaty to be identified with the old interventionist policy frames of the 1970s and 1980s, with the result that the Treaty has fallen out of fashion. This article describes and analyses this process over a fifty-year period, in terms of shifts in the balance of power in European steel policy which enabled a new policy frame to emerge.