The living institutions of the EU: Analysing governance as performance

Abstract

How to analyse the dynamics of informal governance that takes place in networks that are multi-party, polycentric, trans-national and – almost by necessity – inter-cultural? This paper portrays informal governance in the EU as a complex game of negotiation. Actors not only negotiate outcomes but also the rules according to which the negotiation is to take place. This process creates ‘living institutions’ in which participants agree upon rules and credibility and authority for its joint decisions gets established. The argument of the paper is that this implies a crucial role for the dramaturgy of negotiation that co-determines if a negotiation is successful or not. The paper suggests governance should be approached as a sequence of staged performances.

Key Words:

• Informal governance
• institutional ambiguity
• democratic legitimacy
• dramaturgical analysis
• discourse analysis

Notes

¹ I have referred to this phenomenon as ‘institutional void’. This term I derived from the world of art where it referred to a generation of post-modern artists that played with the ‘modern’ expectations of the audience (like in Jeff Koons with his work Ushering of Banality). Upsetting the expectations of various audiences they effectively exposed the discursive rules with which people approached the work of art, thus creating a new, and essentially open, basis for judging was beauty or quality was. A range of exhibitions employed the term ‘void’ to refer to this type of intervention. Judging from the responses, many people interpreted ‘institutional void’ as institutional ‘emptiness’. This blurred the characteristic of different systems of meaning hitting upon each other. In light of the above I think the term ‘institutional ambiguity’ is better suited to bring out the meaning that I intended with the concept.

² Here culture refers to more than merely ethnic differences. After all, inter-cultural communication can also refer to debates between two distinct organizations, each with their own ‘state of mind’ (cf. Williams, 1981).

³ The notion was coined by Olsen (1998).

⁴ This requires detailed anthropological research into the EU informal governance networks, of which there are few examples (see for overviews Borneman & Fowler, 1997; Verlot, 2001). Results of research already done suggest the relevance of this kind of analysis, as the rules for appropriate behaviour appear to be very strict. For instance, Trondal (2001, p. 17) quotes a Norwegian agency official attending the expert committees of the European Commission commenting that: ‘It is important to participate in several meetings in order to learn the history of the group’ (author's translation). ‘The groups have certain codes of conduct. If some of these codes are violated, you are “dead” in the group’ (Norwegian agency official – author's translation).