The Janus Face of Brussels: Socialization and Everyday Decision Making in the European Union

Abstract

This article examines the European Union's Committee of Permanent Representatives, or COREPER, a group composed of the EU permanent representatives (permreps) and responsible for preparing upcoming ministerial meetings of the Council. As the heart of everyday decision making in the EU, COREPER is a key laboratory to test whether and how national officials become socialized into a Brusselsbased collective culture and what difference this makes for EU negotiations. The key scope conditions for COREPER socialization are high issue density/intensity and insulation from domestic politics. COREPER also displays a range of socialization mechanisms, including strategic calculation, role playing, and normative suasion. Based on extensive interview data and a detailed case study of negotiations for a controversial EU citizenship directive, this article documents a socialization pathway in COREPER marked by adherence to a set of norm-guided rules and principled beliefs in collectively legitimating arguments and making decisions. COREPER socialization does not indicate a pattern of national identities being replaced or subsumed; rather, the evidence points to a socialization process based on a "logic of appropriateness" and an expanded conception of the self. Not many international institutional environments can match the density or robustness of collective decision-making norms found in the European Union (EU).' But there are surprisingly few empirical studies of how these collective norms operate in the EU. There is an even greater shortfall of research on the effects of this institutional environment on the basic actor properties of the national officials who participate in this system.2 How does the culture of decision making in the EU affect agents and their bargaining behavior? This article focuses on the Com-For feedback on earlier versions, I am grateful to the project participants and especially Jeffrey Checkel, Matthew Evangelista, Iain Johnston, and Michael Zuirn. I thank the editors and two anonymous reviewers for comments that greatly improved the final product.

Transgovernmental networks and rationalist outputs? The partial social construction of EU foreign policy

“…Diplomats have internalized joint action and coherence as intrinsic values of EU foreign policy. Reaching an agreement is considered a value in itself, together with the responsibility to make the system work (Lewis 2005). At the same time, EU foreign policy contains also substantive policy commitments (human rights, democracy, poverty, multilateralism etc.)…”

“…In the CFSP/CSDP, actors who are able to justify their positions by appealing to EU norms and goals are in a position to shape the negotiation processes and outcomes. There is a peer review quality of the process: the validity of the arguments is constantly challenged, and only those ones that pass the normative test of the group are acknowledged (Lewis 2005). Arguments can be used in a strategic manner and, eventually, rhetorically entrap delegations (Thomas 2011).…”

Peer Pressure: Social Psychology and the Political and Security Committee

“…Anna Juncos and Karolina Pamorska found that there has been little development towards socialization away from strategic calculation in Council Working Groups (CWGs), but that, to the degree it has taken place, it has primarily affected the ability of the agent to influence the principal (Juncos & Pamorska, 2006). Jeffrey Lewis (2005) found that individuals within the Committee of Permanent Representatives (COREPER) had adopted what he called a "Janus face" or European identity and a domestic identity held simultaneously that diplomats did not find contradictory. Lewis found that diplomats had substantially adopted norms of behavior that were considerably different from just pure strategic calculations such as the respect for good arguments, dropping arguments if members of the group did not seem to accept them and attempting to help other members sell final solutions to their capitals, suggesting that COREPER had reached some sort of intermediate stage between Type I and Type II internalization.…”

“…Building on this premise, many authors have presented the argument that international institutions have been the place where these social interactions take place and that they constitute some sort of community (Chayes & Chayes, 1995;Checkel, 1999;Cowles, Caporaso & Risse, 2001;Gheciu, 2005;Howorth, 2000;Johnston, 2001;Lewis, 2005;Risse, Ropp & Sikkink, 1999;Risse, 2000). Within the EU, the focus has been both on individuals being socialized at the EU level and on whole states being socialized as a result of interaction within the EU.…”

Rational Choice and EU Politics

“…Rational choice is 'found deficient in explaining who the key actors are, in explaining their interests, explaining the origin of institutions, or explaining how these change' (Snidal 2002: 74). In EU studies, this external critique is most common among the growing number of constructivist scholars who argue that EU institutions shape not only the behavior but also the preferences and identities of individuals and member states in Europe (Sandholtz 1996;Checkel 2005a, b;Lewis 2005). The argument is stated most forcefully by Christiansen et al (1999: 529), who argue that European integration has had a 'transformative impact' on the interests and identities of individuals, but that this transformation 'will remain largely invisible in approaches that neglect processes of identity formation and/or assume interests to be given exogenously' .…”