Guido Dierickx

The Working Groups of the Council of the European Union: Supranational or Intergovernmental Negotiations?

The purpose of the article is to look at how far the functioning of Council working groups contributes to a supranational or to an intergovernmental communication network. For this we use data collected by interviewing diplomats and civil servants involved in these working groups. Our analysis consists of three steps. First, we describe the communication networks in general. Secondly, we look at how far Member States’ representatives perceive similarities between their potential partners. Thirdly, we investigate to what extent there exist affinities between negotiators and their partners. In a final section, the potential of some explanatory variables will be explored.

Nationality and European Negotiations: The Working Groups of The Council of Ministers

This article explores the communication networks of negotiators in the working groups of the Council of Ministers of the European Union. We employ data collected by interviewing diplomats and civil servants involved in these working groups. These data enable us to explore the role of discretion in a more systematic fashion. We show that negotiation behaviour at the micro-level can be affected by influence esteem, professional esteem, ideological esteem and organization self-esteem. Our approach offers an insight into the world of the men and women involved in day-to-day negotiations and can as such be considered a starting point for more systematic empirical research.

Senior Civil Servants and Bureaucratic Change in Belgium

The Belgian civil service used to be a Weberian bureaucracy, with a strict division of labor between civil servants and politicians, administrative careers based on both seniority and partisan patronage, and a technocratic culture coupled with a high level of alienation from both politics and politicians. Administrative reform came in the wake of the constitutional reform that transformed unitary Belgium into a federal state with several governments, each with a civil service of its own. The fiscal crisis prompted them to look favorably on the promises of New Public Management (NPM). The new Flemish government was first to take advantage of this opportunity, as it had the financial resources, the tendency to refer to Anglo-Saxon and Dutch examples, and the right political and administrative leadership.The staying power of these as yet precarious reforms depends on the continuity of political leadership, the establishment of an administrative culture matching the institutional innovations, and resistance to the endemic temptation to use them for partisan purposes.

The decentralisation of city government and the restoration of political trust

Abstract ‘Local politics’ has specific features that are conducive to the generation of trust, more so than ‘centralised politics’. Local politics is characterised by processes that occur on a small scale, within institutions that enjoy a certain autonomy, that are imbedded in a social community with which the citizens can identify, and that offer the possibility of more democratic participation. Where is the threshold between local and central politics? Clearly, if a city grows to the size of almost half a million inhabitants, as was the case in the port city of Antwerp, it becomes too large for local politics. It also becomes vulnerable to the lure of political distrust, as was manifested by the amazing rise of the extreme right in the 1990s. At least this was the theory that prompted the political leaders of the city to introduce a certain degree of decentralisation. To a certain extent they were right. Our evidence shows that the district councils generate more trust than the city council. Moreover they generate trust among sections of the population that were and remain distrustful of central politics. Will this capital of local political trust overflow into the trust in the higher authorities? Some of the data point in that direction but they are far from conclusive. Anyway it is too early to tell. The decentralisation reform in Antwerp is an interesting experiment but a very recent one.

Belgian civil servants in the European Union: A tale of two cultures

This article analyses the performance of Belgian civil servants in the working groups of the European Council of Ministers. If one takes the evaluation by their peers and the success of their networking efforts as criteria, one has to conclude that they perform comparatively well. This is all the more surprising because these ‘Euro‐Belgian’ civil servants have been recruited and socialised into the vertical (bureaucratic) networks of the Belgian civil service before being transferred to the horizontal (negotiation) networks of the working groups. Their professional routines are of little use when making the transition and neither is their political culture, which proves to be ill adapted to their new work setting. In spite of these cultural and organisational handicaps they perform as well, sometimes even better than other civil servants in the working groups. Why? This question might be of some relevance to the functioning of the growing internationalised administration of the European Union.