Beyond the myth of nationality: Analysing networks within the European commission

The New Eurocrats : National Civil Servants in EU Policymaking

“…Moreover, our study confirms the conclusion from earlier research that purely supranational (i.e., EU-related) loyalties tend to be scarce among national civil servants because their allegiance is primarily with their own government and/or policy area (cf. Suvarierol 2007). Our study adds to this current literature by identifying the predominant role conceptions that certain types of civil servants have, who, we argue, tend to each operate within specific types of international policy networks.…”

Turkish Accession and Defining the Boundaries of Nationalism and Supranationalism: Discourses in the European Commission

“…Perhaps more importantly, what the last two excerpts above suggest is that the narratives on professional/institutional interactions of Commission officials play an important role in assigning to the 'Turks' certain general attributes through the discussions on the issue of sovereignty, providing further support to studies which highlight that institutional contacts play a key role in constructing narratives of identity in the European Commission (Laffan 2004, Risse 2004, Suvarierol 2007. Hence, it can be argued that the Commission officials' experiences within the 'epistemic community' (Haas 1992) that they form with their Turkish counterparts, provide key nodal points around which certain narratives of identities are constructed in Commission discourse.…”

“…At the institutional level, the Commission endorses the norm of supranationalism which is formally defined as being independent from any particular interests (national or other) and mandates through the Treaties and Staff Regulations. Lastly, at the individual level, there is recent empirical evidence that the Commission is a 'hothouse for supranationalism' (Trondal 2007) as it both attracts officials conducive to supranational norms (Suvarierol 2007) and transforms its officials into adopting supranational norms 1 (Laffan 2004, Risse 2004, even officials who join the Commission on temporary contracts such as the seconded national experts (Trondal 2007). This can be explained with the 'logic of appropriateness' (March & Olsen 2004), which posits that (political) actors will act in line with the norms of the organisation they work for.…”

Introduction: Organizational change, management reform and EU policy-making

“…There is no shortage of first-rate textbooks and hundreds of more specific monographs and journal articles (for overviews, see Cini 1996;Nugent 1997Nugent , 2001Spence and Edwards 2006). But only recently and still very sparsely has more attention been paid to the internal organizational life of this crucial actor (Hooghe 2001;Bauer 2001;Trondal 2007;Suvarierol 2007). This new interest 4 in the European Commission as a public administration has been amplified by the shock waves produced by the resignation of the Santer Commission under allegations of fraud and internal mismanagement in 1999.…”

“…It thus seems fair to emphasize that it is by no means clear whether these isolated scholarly endeavours will eventually add to the consolidation of a veritable research agenda, able to connect the pertinent questions from various approaches and to rally the various sub-disciplines behind a set of mature and salient research questions. In this respect, the recent work on organizational change within the European Commission seems much more advanced than that on any other international organization (Egeberg 1999(Egeberg , 2004Trondal 2007;Suvarierol 2007;Bauer 2007b;Balint et al 2008). Put bluntly, to better understand the case of reforming the European Commission little conceptual help can be expected from other research about international public organizations for the time being.…”