This article examines the European Union's Committee of Permanent Representatives, or COREPER, a group composed of the EU permanent representatives (permreps) and responsible for preparing upcoming ministerial meetings of the Council. As the heart of everyday decision making in the EU, COREPER is a key laboratory to test whether and how national officials become socialized into a Brusselsbased collective culture and what difference this makes for EU negotiations. The key scope conditions for COREPER socialization are high issue density/intensity and insulation from domestic politics. COREPER also displays a range of socialization mechanisms, including strategic calculation, role playing, and normative suasion. Based on extensive interview data and a detailed case study of negotiations for a controversial EU citizenship directive, this article documents a socialization pathway in COREPER marked by adherence to a set of norm-guided rules and principled beliefs in collectively legitimating arguments and making decisions. COREPER socialization does not indicate a pattern of national identities being replaced or subsumed; rather, the evidence points to a socialization process based on a "logic of appropriateness" and an expanded conception of the self. Not many international institutional environments can match the density or robustness of collective decision-making norms found in the European Union (EU).' But there are surprisingly few empirical studies of how these collective norms operate in the EU. There is an even greater shortfall of research on the effects of this institutional environment on the basic actor properties of the national officials who participate in this system.2 How does the culture of decision making in the EU affect agents and their bargaining behavior? This article focuses on the Com-For feedback on earlier versions, I am grateful to the project participants and especially Jeffrey Checkel, Matthew Evangelista, Iain Johnston, and Michael Zuirn. I thank the editors and two anonymous reviewers for comments that greatly improved the final product.

The quiet evolution of the Committee of Permanent Representatives (Coreper) into a de facto decision-making body has received surprisingly little attention from integration researchers. Even less attention has been paid to the novel institutional form and underlying rationality of this forum at the interface between the national and Community levels. This article argues that Coreper maintains the performance of the Council through the production of a distinct culture of compromise and community-method. The result, empirically demonstrated in a case study of the 1994 local elections directive, is a shared commitment to finding solutions, where membership in the collective decision-making process has become part of the rational calculus of defining and defending self-interests. These findings suggest the need to modify the 'hard bargaining' image of EU decision-making.

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