The Ordinary Legislative Procedure as a Transversal Vector for the Administrative Convergence in the European Union

Mainly approached from a sectoral point of view, the process of administrative convergence is first and foremost structurally supported by the European procedures governing the European decision-making process. The paper argues that the ordinary legislative procedure itself has acted as a transversal vector of the administrative convergence process both on the formal and informal levels. The ordinary legislative procedure provides very sophisticated tools that contribute throughout the whole cycle of a legislative proposal to the administrative convergence. The impact assessments and the compliance tests with the Charter of Fundamental Rights including the right to a good administration ensures ex ante that the draft legislative proposals meet the basic requirements for a good administrative final act. On an institutional level, the active national experts defending their interests in various structures of the Council of the EU have the possibility to add real national value to each European piece of legislation and thus to play the part of convergence agents. At the same time, the interplay of the European institutions within the framework of the ordinary legislative procedure, formerly known as the codecision procedure, had triggered sophisticated strategies that also directly contributed to the administrative convergence in the European Union. It is in this realm, on the basis of some concrete examples, through the analysis of some tools provided by the ordinary legislative procedure that the paper shows how the rules underlying the very creation of the EU law have horizontally contributed to the process of European administrative convergence.