Didier Georgakakis

Genesis and Structure of European Bureaucratic Capital: Senior European Commission Officials

This chapter reports on a survey of senior European officials and provides in particular a prosopographical study (collective biography) of the general director and deputy general director of the European Commission. It shows that the European Commission, far from being a moving and unpredictable ‘multi-organization’, can be analysed as a space of relatively structured positions based on the production and the uneven distribution of a partly autonomous ‘institutional credit’. It also reveals the centre of gravity where the most powerful directors-general were located in the early 2000s.

The Making of a Status Group: Reconsidering Socialization to the European Institutions

This chapter poses in a different way the traditional question of the socialization of agents ‘going native’. This latter appears to us as much more than adhesion to organizational rules or abstract values, namely as a process of entering a social class of servants of Europe, or more accurately, a Stand in Max Weber’s sense. When they enter as statutory officials, agents get an individual and collective elite position, the permanence of which is guaranteed by staff regulations and an ethos tendentially linked to the service of Europe and public action, and so on. As an engine of the socialization process, the relationship developed between these agents and the ‘class’ is also a principle of variation among the officials, depending on their social-professional trajectory.

Introduction: Moving Pictures

The relatively short introduction sets the stage of the entire volume by providing a summary presentation of the state of the art, the aims and scope of the volume and a sociological discussion on how the European civil service is constructed as a group, why and to what extent. Beginning with a short ethnographical description of European civil servants demonstrating against their ‘dismantlement’ in November 2013, the introduction ends, more traditionally, with a presentation of the chapters of the volume and the articulation between the different chapters while providing an overall picture.

Conclusion: Neoliberalized Neoliberalists? The Weakening Sociological Foundations of a Pivot Group and European Political Order

The conclusion opens three avenues to be explored in connection with the causes of this process, the changing relational and social power of civil servants with respect to their other partners in the field of Eurocracy (national officials, lobbyists and lawyers) and its broader implications for the definition of the scope of European public policies, for the State-building strategy that the best authors have anticipated since Delors’s experience and for the current crisis.

Both the Pilot and a Victim of Austerity? How the European Commission’s Administration Changed under the Economic and Financial Crisis

Tackling successively the 2011–2013 Staff Regulations review and the revaluation of economic skills within the Commission since 2010, this chapter1 offers an analysis of the effects of the economic crisis on EU officials, underscoring the social struggles within the institutions and their consequences regarding the legitimation and delegitimation of their agents. Challenging the Staff Regulations again, while at the same time economic skills became those most valued, did not dismantle the group but generated the human and social conditions for a new political definition of the European institutions.

How Domination Matters: New Internal Struggles and Integrating European-Enlargement Newcomers

How have agents from the new member states changed the EU civil service? The question has long been understood as a cultural and political issue. Following the recent work of Carolyn Ban showing that language and gender issues were the major points of tension in an administration that at the same time was being changed by administrative reforms, this chapter emphasizes a broader definition of culture as a power and domination issue whereby the problem of integration for many eastern newcomers is, as for others before them, that within the field of Eurocracy their position is mostly a dominated one, which has an effect on their strategies, both for the competition and for joining the bandwagon of the neo-managerial and liberal model.

Soft Skills Versus Expertise and Knowledge: The Changing Core Competencies of European Civil Servants

Chapter 5 analyses the debate about the required competencies, or ‘key competencies’, of European civil servants, which is one of the indirect consequences of the administrative reform of the European Commission. It shows that a new definition of competency based more on skills, and either personal or behavioural aptitudes, has become more important than knowledge more specifically connected to the context of the European Union, a process that, though under apparently anecdotal forms, calls into question the social competencies of EU officials and therefore their social authority as ‘servants of Europe’.

Erratum to: “European Civil Service in (Times of) Crisis: A Political Sociology of the Changing Power of Eurocrats”

By shedding new light on the new EU civil servants’ open competition to enter into the EU institutions, Chapter 6 shows how the ‘Custodians of Europe’ are now becoming ordinary international managers. The new procedure promoted by the fairly recently established EU staff-selection authority, EPSO, is now based on two stages inspired by a culture of undifferentiated management, from which knowledge about the EU, and more generally speaking, everything that was previously used as an indicator of expertise and multicultural skills is absent, when not replaced by counter-values, a change breaking with, or at least challenging the consecration model that was previously at the source of the ‘esprit de corps’, but also the ‘symbolic capital’ of the EU administrative elite.

Reforming EU Open Competitions or How the ‘Custodians of Europe’ Now Mimic International Managers

By shedding new light on the new EU civil servants’ open competition to enter into the EU institutions, Chapter 6 shows how the ‘Custodians of Europe’ are now becoming ordinary international managers. The new procedure promoted by the fairly recently established EU staff-selection authority, EPSO, is now based on two stages inspired by a culture of undifferentiated management, from which knowledge about the EU, and more generally speaking, everything that was previously used as an indicator of expertise and multicultural skills is absent, when not replaced by counter-values, a change breaking with, or at least challenging the consecration model that was previously at the source of the ‘esprit de corps’, but also the ‘symbolic capital’ of the EU administrative elite.

A Contested Identity: Genesis of the Eurocrat Figure – Between Stigma and Affirmation of a Differentiated Supranational Body

Although the myth of the Eurocrat may appear to be an illusion (European civil servants are far from being only Eurocrats and the only Eurocrats, far from being homogeneous, far from making decisions independently from the European governments), the chapter shows that this illusion, like Durkheim’s ‘well-founded illusion’, is rooted in the very process of the political construction of Europe, and is fabricated both by its opponents, putting this new emergent elite at a distance, and by partial appropriations by eminent members of the group portraying it as a new administrative elite, technically skilled and well differentiated from national bureaucrats.