Adapting to Brussels: Europeanization of the core executive and the ‘strategic-projection’ model

Abstract

This paper aims to contribute towards our understanding of Europeanization within national core executives. It is critical of conventional accounts which focus solely on the ‘reception’ of adaptational requirements from the European Union (EU). Instead it considers how member states may adapt at home for the purpose of ‘projection’: the attempt to maximize the uploading of national policy preferences into the EU policy-making arena. The paper proposes an innovative ‘strategic-projection’ model which conceptualizes Europeanization as operating through three distinctive modes – strategic adaptation, supranational learning and administrative optimization. Illustrated using examples of adaptation within the UK and Irish central governments between 1997 and 2007, together with evidence drawn from studies in other member states, European integration can be seen to exert largely hidden, but potentially transformative, pressures for change and convergence within national core executives.

Keywords:

• Core executive
• Europeanization
• projection
• uploading

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Simon Bulmer, Martin Burch and Dimitris Papadimitriou for their helpful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this paper. I am also grateful to the Economic and Social Research Council for funding the research that forms the basis of this study.

Notes

The study is based on the testimonies of 58 senior officials and ministers, drawn from across all the main departments of state in London and Dublin, who kindly agreed to be interviewed between July 2005 and May 2009 on a non-attributable basis.

Henceforth ‘prime minister’s office’ refers to all those offices and departments located at the centre of government responsible for co-ordinating policy and strategy across government (including cabinet offices and prime minister’s departments).