Access, Voice and Loyalty: The Representation of Domestic Civil Servants in the EU Committees

How is allegiance apportioned when national civil servants meet in EU committees? This paper investigates the role perceptions and allegiance of Norwegian and Swedish officials on mission in Brussels.

ARENA Working Paper 08/2000 (html)

Jarle Trondal and Frode Veggeland

Moving beyond the intergovernmental versus supranational controversy, the current paper asks whether national civil servants, when participating in Commission expert committees, consider themselves mainly as national government representatives, as independent experts, or merely as supranational agents. Studying Norwegian and Swedish government officials attending Commission expert committees reveal that similar institutional affiliations towards the EU accompany the same representative roles amongst these officials. As such, the current study indicates that the membership versus non-membership dichotomy may not necessarily be the most appropriate dividing line in the study of Europeanization of domestic institutions. Despite Norway and Sweden having different affiliations towards the EU, this study shows that access and voice on the same EU committees accompany the enactment of similar role perceptions amongst Norwegian and Swedish civil servants.

A later version of this article was published in Journal of European Public Policy 10 (1): 59-77, 2003.

Tags: identity, socialization, role conceptions, nationality
Published Nov. 9, 2010 10:52 AM - Last modified Apr. 21, 2016 8:55 PM