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.

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.

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The Belgian senior civil servants do have a political ideology which, with respect to coherence and constraint, is not inferior to that of the members of Parliament and, therefore, far superior to that of the common man. The first characteristic of this ideology is its centrism: senior civil servants tend to shun the extremes, especially the socio-economic (leftist and rightist) extremes. A second characteristic is its bias toward the center-right. But the latter may be an effect of recruitment and promotion practices under the recent Belgian governing coalitions, rather than of the bureaucratic experience under all kinds of governments.That the bureaucratie experience leaves its mark on the ideological constructs of the bureaucratie elite can also be inferred from other data. They are inclined to centralism because the recent federalisation process imposes a heavy burden on their routines. They do not have a distinctive ideological profile with respect to religious and philosophical issues because these rarely appear on the agenda of most of the civil servants.The consequences of these characteristic ideological options are not to be underestimated.  There is a clear affinity between a leftist ideology and a less technocratic and less alienated political attitude. At the same time leftist civil servantsare more inclined to commit themselves to active partisan politics. Their colleagues of the right tend more to up hold the traditional distance between bureaucracy and partisan politics. The optimal prescription for administrative reform would, perhaps, consist in furthering a more political, less technocratic style of administrative policy making, and in maintaining the traditional wariness of partisan politics.