The Luxembourg and Copenhagen Reports clearly laid the foundations for intensive information-sharing about foreign policy among EU member states. Yet we can say much more about the relationship between institutionalized communication and international cooperation than those who view cooperation as one-shot deals or quid pro quo contracts. When patterns of communication persist and become increasingly complex and dense, whether by accident or design, the demand for common standards of behavior may grow as actors continue to engage one another. The emergence of these standards, or norms, takes collective behavior to a higher level of institutionalization by translating general values or ideas into specific behavior patterns. In the case of EU foreign policy, norms helped EPC progress from a passive forum or talking shop to a more active, collective, foreign policymaking mechanism. This occurred despite the fact that EU governments continued to claim the right to maintain their sovereignty and flexibility over foreign policy and often rejected the formal legalization of their cooperation in this domain.

The specific processes involved in this transition are the subject of this chapter. As I proposed in Chapter 2, norm development can be conceived in terms of several steps: (1) the emergence of informal (uncodified) customs, or the (often unspoken) traditions and practices that emerged in day-to-day interactions among EPC officials; (2) the codification or ordering of these informal customs into explicit, written norms; (3) the transition from explicit norms to rules (rights and obligations), as reflected in EPC reports; and (4) the transition from rules into formal laws (legal rules), which involve behavioral and legal obligations.

In search of eurofonctionnaires

A Commission without ready access (at least until 4 or 5 pm) to cappuccino, espresso, or lemon tea – and fresh croissants or Danish pastries – would be difficult to imagine. The cafeteria, often tucked away in a corner of the building, serves as an escape valve in an intense work environment, where officials unwind with political commentaries, playful flirtation, and culturally tinged pleasantries. French is still the dominant social language, though this is changing rapidly with English on the upswing. Yet old-timers claim that social gatherings have become increasingly mono-national: Spanish meet Spanish, Irish socialize with Irish, and so forth. The cafeteria is also a desirable location for informal work meetings. At any point during the day, one may observe a group of four to six officials sharing jokes or opinions with their chef d'unité (head of unit). Sometimes it is easier to vent frustration or air new ideas in the friendly and neutral setting of the cafeteria.

The occasional visitor may not pick up subtle differences between these two types of gatherings. A closer look reveals telling contrasts. Whereas social gatherings are usually genuinely egalitarian, work meetings are shaped by a fair dose of hierarchy. This is, after all, a public administration – and, in theory, one built on Weberian principles of organization. More remarkable still are the differences in the composition of these groups. The former gatherings are often nationally monocultural, but the latter always consist of different nationalities.

Between June 1995 and February 1997 I conversed with 137 directors-general, deputy directors-general, directors, and senior advisors of the European Commission in semi-structured interviews lasting on average 79 minutes. I also asked them to mail back a structured questionnaire containing behavioral and attitudinal questions. By May 1997, I had received 106 mail questionnaires. These interviews and mail questionnaires provide the empirical basis for this book. I elaborate below five important elements in this research: the context, the organization, sampling, interviewing, and the people.

The context

The European Union is at a crossroads between 1995 and 1997. Its future is deeply contested and uncertain, and yet Europe's elites, if not its citizens, seem determined to integrate deeper and faster. Three major issues dominate the headlines and structure the daily dealings of top Commission officials: economic and monetary union (EMU) – at first, the plan's survival, and, later, the conditions of implementation; the ban from the European internal market of British beef infected by BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy – “mad cow disease”); and preparations for the 1996–7 intergovernmental conference, which would culminate in the 1999 Amsterdam Treaty. Two deeper concerns cloud EU politics during that period. Public opinion polls register a rapid rise in public dissatisfaction with European integration, and, on the economic front, most European countries suffer from persistently high unemployment whereas the US economy is booming. This is the political background against which I probe top Commission officials' basic preferences on EU governance.

In search of market liberals

For a long time, Europe's left was reluctant to support European integration. In its 1952 party program, the German social democratic party castigated supranational Europe as “a conservative and capitalist federation of the miniature Europe” (Haas 1958: 137). It is true that socialist parties in all six founding states helped to ratify the Treaty of Rome, but their support was often qualified – concerned as they were that European economic integration would make it more difficult to pursue socialist policies. Ambivalence or opposition also initially characterized left parties in Britain, Ireland, and Denmark in the 1970s, Greece in the early 1980s, and Sweden in the 1990s. The least one can say is that the left has not been in the vanguard of European integration. The uniting of Europe was crafted by parties of the center and the right (Featherstone 1988: 2).

The left's suspicion was understandable. Until the 1999 Treaty of Amsterdam, there was a powerful institutional bias in EU Treaties and legislation in favor of market-creating (i.e., negative) integration and against market-correcting (i.e., positive) regulation (Dehousse 1992; Majone 1992, 1994a, 1996; Pinder 1968; Scharpf 1996; Streeck 1991, 1996; Streeck and Schmitter 1991). A close examination of the Treaties leads Mark Pollack to conclude that, “from Rome to Maastricht, the fundamental thrust of the treaties has been neo-liberal, in the sense that each of the Community's constitutive treaties facilitated the creation of a unified European market, while setting considerable institutional barriers to the regulation of that same market” (Pollack 1999: 268).

It is a sticky, hot July afternoon in Brussels. My interview with the Commission director was scheduled for four o'clock, but it is now well past five. At last, the door swings open and four people leave, talking animatedly. I am waved into the room, and I switch on the tape recorder. Towards the end of the interview, I accidentally find out what kept me waiting for so long. When I ask my interviewee to define the European Union's greatest challenges, he recounts the following story:

The study of the European Union (EU) has vacillated between being a vanguard for theoretical innovation and a feast for area specialists. The turn of the century has been a time of connecting these two worlds.

This book on preferences in the European Commission is written for both generalists and EU area specialists. For EU students, I explore the beliefs of decision makers at the heart of Europe about who should govern, how, and over whom. These questions have structured political competition in Europe's national states over the past century and a half. They now shape EU politics. Scholars have begun to map contestation among public, parties, and private interests. But how do office holders in the European Union's central executive and administrative body, the European Commission, conceive of European integration? What kind of European Union do top Commission officials want? Should the European Union be supranational or intergovernmental? Should it promote market liberalism or regulated capitalism? Should the Commission be an executive principal or an administrative/managerial agent? Should it be a consociational or a Weberian organization?

Between 1995 and 1997, I set up camp in Brussels in order to ask these people what they think of the integration of Europe. These 137 interviews constitute the empirical bedrock of this book. The leadership of the Commission holds diverse, not unitary views. Contrary to conventional wisdom, I find that top officials are divided as sharply as national parties, governments, and national publics.

The conventional notion that the Commission is a unitary actor is misleading. In reality, the Commission is culturally diverse and politically divided. Visitors are struck by the linguistic and cultural variety within and among directorates-general (DGs). As one moves down the corridor of a typical DG, or takes the stairs to the next floor, one is beamed from a French-speaking into a predominantly English- or Spanish-speaking environment – dotted with one-to-one conversations in Danish, Greek, or Dutch. Administrative and social styles vary markedly. Some units swear by an egalitarian consultative style; others are run in a hierarchical and directive fashion. Here are a few cues for distinguishing one from the other: whether doors are open or closed; whether several small informal meetings of co-workers are going on, or one director-led assembly; whether secretaries are facilitators or gatekeepers; whether it takes a simple phone call (or email), fax or letter, or a formal application to the hierarchy to meet an official; whether circulaires (the famous trail of bureaucratic paperwork) are treated on a first-in first-out basis, or reach to the ceiling in the director's office.

Political preferences differ from office to office. Euro-federalists work with defenders of state power and politically agnostic policy wonks. Market liberals negotiate with social democrats and with independents. Officials concerned about the Commission's managerial deficit argue with colleagues opposed to trading the Commission's executive power for administration and management.

Senior civil servants work in two worlds simultaneously: they make and take orders for routine actions in the hierarchical world of public administration, on the basis of formal rules, cost–benefit analysis, and expertise; and they mobilize support for contentious decisions in the non-hierarchical world of politics, through networking and arm-twisting. Combining politics with expertise is indispensable in modern governance. Yet the relationship between these two worlds is delicate and contested, and senior civil servants, who are the interface between them, are directly affected.

Several institutional characteristics of the European Union exacerbate the tension between political agenda-setting and bureaucratic service (Hooghe 1997; Page 1997). In conjunction with the College of Commissioners, the officials of the European Commission have a constitutional obligation to set the legislative agenda because they have exclusive formal competence to draft EU legislation (except in foreign policy and some asylum and immigration issues). This competence sets senior Commission officials apart from their counterparts in national administrations. So they promote the policies of their directorate to private interests, politicians, public, and, last but not least, reluctant Commission colleagues. They direct negotiations between the Commission, on the one hand, and the Council of Ministers' working groups, the European Parliament, and interest groups, on the other. They broker legislative negotiations between the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament. Yet, as career civil servants, they also execute and administer political decisions taken by elected leaders. In that capacity, they provide administrative and managerial leadership to over 4,000 Commission administrators.

Commission Socialization

Years in Commission service. Source: Biographical data from The European Companion (London: DPR Publishing, 1992, 1994); Euro's Who's Who (Brussels: Editions Delta, 1991); and from interviews by the author.

ERC-Soc

I calculate how many years each official spent in DGs dealing with European regulated capitalism. I use a restrictive definition of services for European regulated capitalism: social regulation (social policy, culture, environment, vocational training and education, consumer services: DGs V, X, XI, XXII, XXIV) and redistribution (agriculture, third world development, fisheries, regional policy: DGs VI, VIII, XIV, XVI). Source: biographical data and interviews.

Cabinet Experience

A dummy, with a value of 1 for those who served in a Commission cabinet. Source: biographical data and interviews.

National Administration

Years in national service. These concern positions in the executive branch of the state and hierarchically subordinate to central government: civil servants in line ministries, diplomats (excluding EU postings), and government ministers (but not national parliamentarians). For public officials with some autonomy from central authorities (courts, central bank, parliament, public companies, local government) or in positions with a strong European component (European desks in foreign affairs or near the head of government), I divide the number of years by two. Source: Biographical data and interview data.

Type of National Administration: Strong/Medium/Weak Weberian

Three dummies that tap strong/medium/weak Weberian bureaucratic tradition. I compare bureaucracies along four dimensions developed by Edward Page, and use these comparisons to categorize bureaucratic traditions along a consociational–Weberian dimension.

Crisis in spring: Commission resigns en masse

These words prefaced The Economist's biographical sketch of Mr. Erkki Liikanen, at the time the commissioner for budget, administration and personnel matters (The Economist, December 19, 1998, p. 66). Mr. Liikanen received praise in this article for his efforts to improve sound and efficient financial management. Yet, on March 15, 1999, he resigned with the entire Santer Commission after the publication of an independent expert report exposing six cases of fraud or mismanagement and several instances of nepotism in the Commission.

The unprecedented en masse resignation of the Commission was the climax of a six-month tug of war between Europe's executive and the European Parliament. It began, in the fall of 1998, with parliamentary inquiries into the Commission's financial management. Leaks from a disgruntled Commission official to the Green party fraction had triggered these. A parliamentary resolution of January 14, 1999, called for an official investigation by independent experts into alleged cases of fraud and mismanagement of Commission funds.

European integration studies have found it difficult to produce cumulative research. Some may argue that cumulative knowledge is always hard to come by in area studies. Yet Europe has traditionally been a rewarding laboratory for scholars in search of answers to basic questions. Various subfields in political science – political parties, mass public opinion, welfare regimes, systems of industrial relations, public administration, public policy, social movements, or value change – draw empirically primarily from the “area of Europe”.

Cumulative research in European integration studies has been an uphill struggle for several reasons. One is that European integration has often been perceived as a unique case. Despite Giovanni Sartori's warning that “he who knows only one country knows none” (Sartori 1991), many EU scholars have been reluctant to consider the European Union as one case within an n larger than one. Ironically, the study of regional integration in Europe began as a distinctly comparative-historical enterprise. European integration occupied a secondary place to international integration in David Mitrany's functionalist theory (Mitrany 1966). Ernie Haas (1958, 1960, 1964) wrote about various forms of regional integration that were emerging in postwar Europe, including the Nordic Council, the Council of Europe, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), the Western European Union, and the predecessors of the European Community (EC), such as the European Coal and Steel Community. He also analyzed global forms of integration, such as the International Labour Organization, a study that had a strong influence on his formulation of neofunctionalism (Haas 1964).

In search of supranationalists

Interviewing in the Commission's most powerful directorates-general is carefully regulated, perhaps because the prey is much in demand, highly prized, and occasionally somewhat threatening to the hunter. Visitors to the directorate-general (DG) for competition policy are chaperoned from the security guards' reception desk to the interviewee's office and back, to prevent them from roaming through secret competition files. Security guards also man access to the DG for agriculture – as they do for virtually all Commission buildings. They collect passports and information on profession and address, and they phone the contact person. The guards in the DG for agriculture allow one to make the journey up to floor five, seven or eight all by oneself. Yet the headquarters of this DG are intimidating: the floor plan is labyrinthine, the silent windowless corridors with closed doors are endless, and the building's lopsided structure with multiple exits is confusing as it plunges from the hilltop on Wetstraat onto Joseph Ⅱ Straat approximately 70 feet lower. Maybe because of this architecture – incomprehensible to the outsider – the ethos of discipline, power, and confidence is all the more palpable.

A visitor may be forgiven for perceiving these fortress-like features as telling symbols of the Commission's preference for supranationalism. Reality is more complicated. Top officials in these strongholds vary appreciably in the degree to which they support a supranational or an intergovernmental Union.