Frédéric Mérand’s book makes an original contribution to the study of EU politics and, in particular, to the study of the cabinets of European Commissioners, for which he presents a unique ethnographic case study, somewhere between the seminal works of George Ross (Jacques Delors and European Integration, 1995) and Jean Joana and Andy Smith (Les Commissaires Européens: Technocrates, Diplomates ou Politiques?, 2002). Studies on the European Commission are by far the most abundant in the field of European politics. The desire to make the European Commission a body that is “political, very political”, as its former president Jean Claude Junker claimed when he took office in 2014, has furthermore generated a considerable array of literature on the politicisation of this organisation. Mérand’s ethnography of the life of the cabinet—with which he spent two months a year during its five-year mandate (2014–2019)—of the former Commissioner for Economy and Finance, Pierre Moscovici deals with this issue, but it is an ethnographic study that goes far beyond that.

The book is structured as follows: after an introduction that presents the way in which this book constructs the question of politicisation and the contribution of the ethnographic method, a first chapter presents the main actors of the cabinet and the context of the constraints that weigh on these actors’ ability to do political work. The subsequent chapters are devoted to a series of political issues, which Mérand reports on from the point of view of the cabinet and its actions, before concluding. Chapters 2 and 3 deal with the negotiations with Greece when Yanis Varoufakis was Greek Finance Minister and after his departure. Chapter 4 presents a kind of parenthesis on the French Commissioner’s links with French politics and the consequences of the departure of F. Hollande and the arrival of E. Macron as head of state. Chapters 5 and 6 deal with the policy of the Stability Pact and the peculiar turn it took after the 5 Star and Liga coalition government came to power in Italy. The reform of the euro zone (Chapter 7) and tax policy, with the two cases of the fight against tax evasion (Chapter 8) and the taxation of Gafas (Chapter 9), complete the overview of the most political issues of the mandate.

All in all, the book represents a dive into the European institutions which will be essential for all those—whether specialist or not (the book avoids jargon)—who seek to better understand the functioning of the EU, especially when they seek to do so at a distance from the political beating heart of Brussels. But this study will also be of wider interest to the political and social science community, as the EU is presented here as a site for addressing more cross-cutting questions. I discuss three such questions here.

To what extent and in what ways do politicians who are supposed to lead complex bureaucratic groups and navigate intricate diplomatic, technical, and legal interdependencies have the capacity to make their actions political and in what way(s)? And what does the hybrid transnational system of specific regional integration that the EU represents show us? To understand this, Mérand breaks with the most common definitions of the politicisation of the European Commission. Drawing on the work of both Hannah Arendt and Pierre Bourdieu, he starts from the principle that “things are not political in themselves, but that they become so” and defines political work as the search for “the extension of the collective capacity to make choices in a context structured by various legal, economic, diplomatic and technocratic constraints.” The book thus shows the important limits of the political work of a European Commissioner and their team. As the head of the cabinet theorises at one point, the art of the European compromise invites actors to navigate between the constraints of the institutions, the Member States and public opinion. Consequently, the margins are very narrow and far from having the capacity to produce radical transformations. The different cases studied, however, show the delicate and intense work that takes place to open up the margins and scope for action. This work is done less in view of public opinion, as such, or the parliament (except on the subject of taxes) and focusses more on mobilising the key players in the negotiations. However, it involves a constant effort at making sense of or rethinking meaning, interpretation, and framing (in informal meetings, lunches) or during semi-public events (the Commission’s press room, trips to the capitals of Member States). Doing politics means shifting the lines of the initial balance of power by seeking to exert influence on the categorisation of public action, the meaning of certain instruments, priorities and temporalities.

The ethnographic method, which has already been said to be underused in the study of political decision-making (see R.A.W. Rhodes, Paul’t Hart, and Mirko Noordegraaf, “Being there,” in Observing Government Elites, 1‑17, 2007), proves to be a good method for showing this, and this is the second contribution of the book. The perspective taken in Ross’s seminal work on the Delors cabinet, allows us to get as close as possible to practices in Brussels, while distancing ourselves from the overly mechanistic uses of the interpretation models that are more frequently applied in studies in this field. The actors do have preferences, but these are not necessarily the ones that govern. Their reading of the situation is much more fraught and hesitant. Contexts of uncertainty are almost constant. From crises, for which remedies must be invented from scratch, to the difficulties of long-term strategies, which must pass through so many arenas and translation processes that plans are constantly in disarray; it is impossible to disentangle rational action and socialisation. The struggles of institutions do not resemble clear confrontations but permanent adjustments that are sometimes imperceptible insofar as they are internalised by the actors. At the same time, agency does not stand in opposition to structure(s) and neither does the micro to the macro. From this point of view, Mérand implicitly constructs his observations in the tradition of Niel Fligstein and the uses that political sociology makes of social field theory (see Didier Georgakakis, and Jay Rowell, eds. The Field of Eurocracy: Mapping EU Actors and Professionals. Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2013). The interactions described under the microscope do not come from nowhere, but they update the major structures of the field, like the partly different visions of Europe held by insiders and outsiders (those, within the cabinet, pursuing careers in Brussels and those coming from national politics), as well as the tensions between pure economists and politicians (see Didier Georgakakis, and Frédéric Lebaron. “Yanis (Varoufakis), the Minotaur, and the Field of Eurocracy,” Historical Social Research / Historische Sozialforschung 43[3], 2018 on these aspects). Social anthropologists will no doubt regret that the cultural stereotypes that underpin social dominations in the field are not sufficiently teased out, but they will appreciate that the book highlights the central weight of representations and often misunderstandings (Moscovici, who is seen as very pale pink in France, is seen as a Marxist in Brussels). All this points to the relative closure of the field, which means that citizens remain most often at a distance, as do national or international political specialists who are not socialised into the specificities of the EU playing/social field.

Finally, the book addresses the relationship of politics to the globalised economy. By showing how EU economic policy depends on the art of navigating between the EU institutions (including the ECB) and their rules, coalitions of member states (or third parties, such as the United States in the context of Gafa in particular), and international organisations (there is also a lot of discussion of the IMF and the OECD), it shows how the political promises to transform capitalism after the crisis have led to more modest achievements. External shocks are not enough. Between the mood of the beginning of the Junker Commission’s mandate and the end, the urgency of transforming capitalism seems to have been exhausted in the strong inertia of some member states (especially Germany, often mentioned in the book), the incessant back and forth within the Commission and between the institutions in charge, and the necessary compromises with international or economic institutions completely independent of the Commission (from the ECB to the IMF and the OECD). Political pressure, that of the Parliament or of public opinion, is too weak, or too mediatised by national oppositions, to be a lever. This is not to say that nothing has been done. Of course, the actors have divergent interpretations, the Brussels insiders think that they have redrawn the lines around the conception of the economy, the Parisians—many of whom will return to national politics—are disappointed at not having achieved the turnaround they were hoping for, but everything indicates that the transformations in interpretation and the broadening of margins provided solutions during the crisis represented by COVID-19 and some even more important advances were made at this time. If Mérand’s analysis disenchants many naïve perceptions of politics as a capacity to produce massive short-term transformations, it partly reenchants it by showing the efforts made by the actors to maintain equilibrium within these very complex interdependencies and to seek solutions, even when it means that these solutions will be realised later on.