La Commission européenne dans son rapport au politique : Pourquoi et comment faire de la politique sans en avoir l'air ?

Abstract

This article analyzes how European civil servants relate to the political dimension of their action in the European Union. The first part, describes the different dimensions taken of the Commission's relationship to politics present in the discourse the institution and its members produce about themselves. The second part, is centred more specificially upon European policy on Central and Eastern European Countries. Through this example, the article endeavours to reveal to what extent and how the Commission 's relationship to politics drives and structures the daily practices of civil servants and leads the European Commission as a whole to select particular types of policy making.

Depoliticisation at the European Level: Delegitimisation and Circumvention of Representative Democracy in Europe’s Governance

“…"A way of doing politics and pretending not to" (Robert, 2001), expertise is thus a form of legitimization that the European Commission shares with other protagonists, all equally essential to Europe's governance. Following the perspective defended by A.…”

“…This conception of depoliticization is then empirically questionable. Firstly, its nominalist reasoning seems ill-suited to an institutional space in which a same case/object is frequently subjected to competing labelling, presented by some as technical, and by others as political (Robert, 2001;Baisnée and Smith, 2006). Secondly, this understanding of depoliticization phenomena relies also on a singular vision of the history of the EU of which many works, dating politicization from the 1990s, overinflate the technical and irenic character of the first decades (Hooghe and Marks, 2009), and only refer to depoliticization dynamics from the early 2000s, as a response to, and component of, "crises", especially of the eurozone (Majone, 2011, see also Anders, Kauppi and Trenz, and Wiesner in this volume).…”

The European farmer’s union: toward the sundering between agricultural organizations and the sector-based farm associations?

“…S'il est en mesure de fournir certaines informations, les lobbyistes du COPA ne sont pas des experts agricoles. Parallèlement, la DG Agri déve-loppe au milieu des années 80 sa propre expertise et n'hésite pas à contacter directement les syndicats nationaux afin de récolter les éventuelles informations qui lui seraient nécessaires tout en légitimant son action (Robert 2001). Le COPA dispose ainsi d'une légitimité restreinte aux yeux des pouvoirs publics européens, l'eurogroupe leur semblant trop déconnecté des agriculteurs et du terrain et n'étant en mesure que de proposer des positions minimalistes.…”

Turkey: politicization instrument and object

“…Les analyses ont montré le rapport complexe que la Commission européenne entretient au politique : elle « fait de la politique sans en avoir l'air » (Robert 2001). Cette assertion vaut aussi plus généralement pour l'Union européenne : « le déni du politique qui est au principe du discours d'acteurs majeurs de l'Union européenne, se matérialise notamment par l'impossibilité de présenter les décisions comme politiques, c'est-à-dire de faire appel à des principes de légitimation et d'argumentation du même ordre (idéologiques, partisans, sectoriels, etc.).…”