Politics and Culture in Europe in 2012

Research programme director:
Prof. Tannelie Blom

Programme profile

The Politics and Culture in Europe (PCE) research programme is devoted to answering theoretical, normative and empirical questions related to the phenomenon of European integration. It is a deliberately interdisciplinary research programme that seeks to understand and explain the process of European integration in its political, institutional and ideational dimensions by taking into account the different contexts of this process: this pertains to the historically embedded and culturally entrenched regional and national differences that are ‘uploaded’ to the supranational level of politics and administration, as well as to the global context. Economic and financial interdependence, the worldwide consequences of regional conflicts and civil wars, and problems of development, migration and environmental change together have an impact on developments and events in Europe. By implication, a lot of what happens within the framework of the EU can only be analysed satisfactorily by bringing in the international, if not global, perspective.

The programme’s 2011 and 2012 research ranged from reflections on the history and nature of EU polity with a view to its democratic credentials to the empirical and theoretical analysis of ‘Europeanization’ processes; from research on the EU’s foreign and security policy to the study of Euroscepticism in its different guises; and from a scrutiny of administrative cultures and bureaucratic politics at the national and supranational levels to historical research on the constitutive role of statistics for state and polity building. These research interests crystallised around a common interest in Administrative Governance. Under this heading we are looking into the bureaucratic organisations that sovereign nation states establish to facilitate trans- and supranational policy coordination and integration, yet have also become politically meaningful actors. Of particular interest are questions concerning the historical genesis and development of such trans- and supranational bureaucracies and, related to that, the conditions under which civil servants working in or with such bureaucracies are able to exert substantial influence on the content, scope and execution of decisions and policies which formally result from negotiations among democratically elected political actors. Moreover, we pay specific attention to the role of information and expertise in the EU and other international organisations.

Within this theme, we have defined three broad and overlapping research lines:

• Administrative Governance of European Public Policymaking: focusing on administrative players and procedures related to making European and international public policies;
• Administrative Governance of Multilateral Foreign Policy: focusing on the diplomatic bureaucracies underpinning processes of multilateral foreign policy formulation. Special attention is paid to the EU as one of the most advanced and complex forms of foreign policy cooperation;
• Administrative Governance in a Historical Perspective: looking at the concrete workings of public administration in its executive functions as well as its involvement in policymaking from a historical perspective.