![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
Abstract
The article provides a comparative analysis of core executive adaptation to engagement with the European Union in three states: Ireland, Greece and Finland. To date, the substantive focus of the literature on executive adaptation has been on the question of convergence or continuing divergence of national responses. The dominant conclusion points to the continuing divergence of national responses. The analytical framework that guided the empirical work in this paper was divided into two inter-related institutional components: structures and processes, and the agents who actively engage with the EU's governance structures. The comparative analysis provides evidence of both convergence and continuing diversity. In managing Europe from home, states appear to choose from a menu of possible models, prime ministerial-led or foreign ministry-led systems. Two variables stand out in explaining variation across the three states, the level of institutionalisation and the relationship between formal and informal processes.
Acknowledgements
A six-country study, Organising for Enlargement, was financed under the EU's Fifth Framework Research Programme. The financial support of the Commission is acknowledged and appreciated. The study was coordinated by the Dublin European Institute, University College Dublin, and involved a research team in each state. The project website with relevant papers is at http://www.oeue.net/. I would like to thank Johan Olsen and Simon Bulmer for their helpful comments on an earlier comparative paper that included three new member states as well. This paper was presented to the EUSA 9th Biennial Conference, 31 March–2 April 2005, Austin Texas at a panel on Europeanizing the Core Executive: Comparing Member State Experiences. I wish to thank Professor Alberta Sbragia who commented on the papers at that conference. I would also like to thank two anonymous referees for their contribution to sharpening the arguments.
Notes
1. It is not intended in this article to engage in a comprehensive discussion of the literature on Europeanisation. It is very diffuse literature and research agenda that attempts to address how Europe hits home in terms of national politics, policies and polities. For treatments of the topic see Cowles et al. (Citation2001), Knill (Citation2001), Olsen (Citation2002) and Featherstone and Radaelli (Citation2003). During the 1990s there was an explosion of literature on Europeanisation.
2. The four other faces of Europeanisation were: Europeanisation as a change in external territorial boundaries; Europeanisation as the development of institutions of governance at an EU level; Europeanisation as exporting forms of political organisation and governance beyond the European territory; and Europeanisation as a political project (Olsen Citation2002).
3. The Hanf and Soetendorp (Citation1998) volume is the only volume that analyses the adaptation of small states. The selection of the six cases with a mixture of existing member states that joined at different times and new member states enabled us to track change over time and to analyse the demands of the EU on national core executives. The body of EC law and the policy processes of the Union have intensified since the mid-1980s. Thus managing Europe is a changing process for national core executives.
4. The studies on executive adaptation to EU membership adopt an institutionalist perspective. Traditionally these studies consisted of empirically driven thick descriptions of formal governmental structures. In the 1990s the impact of the new institutionalism was felt with a growing number of studies adopting a historical institutionalist perspective.
5. The Bulmer and Burch analysis distinguishes between (a) formal institutional structures, (b) processes and procedures, (c) codes and guidelines and (d) a cultural dimension (Bulmer and Burch Citation1998: 604). The analytical categories were changed and later work includes (a) the systemic level, (b) the organisational level, (c) the regulative level and (d) the procedural level (Bulmer and Burch Citation2001: 72).
6. In the existing member states, France, the UK and Finland are the only three states that located the key coordinating unit either in the PM's office or as a separate agency responsible to it. In contrast, most of the candidate states opted to locate their coordinating unit under the auspices of the PM.
