Compliance with EU Law and Argumentative Discourse: Representing the EU as a Problem-Solving Multilevel Governance System through Discursive Structures of Argumentation

This paper analyzes how, during the Juncker Presidency (2014–2019), the European Commission employed argumentative strategies to address the question of member-states’ compliance with European Union (EU) law. There is a literature gap regarding how European leaders employ argumentative strategies to coax member-states to comply with EU legislation and how those strategies can be associated with multilevel governance designs and problem-solving approaches. Building on van Eemeren and Grootendorst’s (A systematic theory of argumentation. The Pragma-dialectical approach, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004) pragma-dialectical approach to argumentation, the paper explores what dialectical and rhetorical strategies were employed by the Juncker European Commission to build an argumentative regime where the question of compliance with European Union law is articulated with the representation of the European Union as an efficient multilevel governance system. Starting from the distinction between procedural and operational concepts of problem-solving in multilevel governance polities (Maggetti in Public Administration 97:355–369, 2019), the paper questions whether the Juncker Commission’s arguments on the need to ensure European Union law compliance favor a particular conception of problem-solving in multilevel governance systems. The paper argues that the argumentative strategies employed by the Juncker European Commission in the field of compliance reveal a preference for an operational notion of problem-solving combined with some aspects of a more procedural perspective of problem-solving in multilevel governance polities. The background of this paper is associated with the growing impact that European legislation has on member-states and also with the efforts developed by the Juncker European Commission in discussing how to improve EU regulation to increase compliance with EU law.