Telecommunications Policy-making in the European Union

Book excerpt: This book offers a good study of the development of telecommunications policy by the EU. . . Great value to those interested in understanding both European telecommunications policy and more generally in how policy-making operates in the EU. Mark Thatcher, West European Politics . . . the book provides an interesting perspective on the evolution of nature of telecommunications policy-making within the EU. As a consequence, the book should be of interest to telecommunications and politics/government researchers alike, Jason Whalley, Communications Booknotes Quarterly This well-written book deals with the emergence and shaping of telecommunications policy in Europe, with a particular focus on the time period of 1987 1998. . . This book fills an important gap reviewing the initial formative years of European telecommunications policy development and liberalization in detail. The book captures the complicated and interdependent policy formation process in Europe in a credible and thoughtful way, without falling into the trap of admiring critical personalities and key actors. . . The author has written an important and useful book, which invites the research community to further explore the evolution of European telecommunications policy. Erik Bohlin, Communications & Strategies Examining the emergence of a European Union telecommunications policy, Joseph Goodman explains how and why the policy developed as it did and why certain reforms in the sector were easier to achieve than others. He provides a history of the key actors in the policy-making process from the first attempts by the national postal, telegraph, and telecommunication administrations to coordinate their telecommunications policies in the 1950s, to the implementation of a comprehensive EU telecommunications regulatory structure in 1998 and the development of a new regulatory structure in 2003. The analytical framework employed by the author draws upon new institutionalism and actor-based approaches, providing an opportunity to evaluate the utility of a synthetic approach for examining and explaining EU policy-making. The focus of his analysis is on the European Commission s two-pronged strategy of liberalisation and harmonisation, which began in the late 1980s and culminated in an important milestone on January 1st 1998, when the EU Member States fully opened their telecommunications markets to competition. He concludes that a synthetic approach, which enables the researcher to apply a number of approaches to multiple settings and various levels of analysis, is useful even necessary in understanding and explaining the many dimensions of EU policy-making. This authoritative study will be of interest to all those in the telecommunications industry including attorneys, consultants, and lobbyists who would like to know how the EU s policy developed. It will appeal, more generally, to political scientists and scholars of European history and politics.