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.

本文分析了在容克任职期间（2014-2019年），欧盟委员会如何采用辩论性策略来解决成员国遵守欧盟法律的问题。关于欧洲领导人如何运用议论性的策略来哄骗成员国遵守欧盟法律，以及这些策略如何与多层次的治理设计和解决问题的方法相关联，存在文献上的空白。建立在范·艾默伦（van Eemeren）和格鲁滕多斯特（Grootendorst）的（系统的论证理论。《实用注解》方法，剑桥大学出版社，剑桥，2004年）《实用注解》论证方法中，本文探讨了容克欧洲委员会采用了哪些辩证和修辞策略来建立一个有争议的制度，其中以欧洲联盟作为一种有效的多层次治理体系的代表来阐明遵守欧洲联盟法律的问题。从区分多级治理政体的程序化和操作性概念之间的区别开始（Maggetti in Public Administration 97：355–369，2019），本文提出了容克委员会关于确保欧盟法律合规性的论点是否有利于多级治理系统中解决问题的特定概念。该论文认为，容克欧洲委员会在合规领域采用的议论性策略显示出了对解决问题的操作性概念的偏爱，并结合了多级治理政体中更程序化的解决问题观点的某些方面。本文的背景与欧洲立法对成员国的日益增长的影响有关，也与容克欧洲委员会在讨论如何改善欧盟法规以增加对欧盟法律的遵守程度方面所做的努力有关。