The High Authority, later the European Commission, was indeed an organisational innovation. Unlike international governmental organisations, it should from its very inception be able to act independently of national governments. Its autonomy was to be justified by its role as a promoter of the...

While role behaviour and conflict dimensions in the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union have been fairly well documented, studies on the internal functioning of the College of the European Commission have been almost lacking. Thus, highly inconsistent images exist; ranging...

Case studies indicate that national governments may be partly split so that national (regulatory) agencies operate in a ‘double-hatted’ manner, serving both ministerial departments and the European Commission. Applying large-N questionnaire data this paper follows up these studies by...

The paper starts by discussing what I think most students of government hold to be the most characteristic features of development over the last couple of decades; namely ‘agencification’ and fragmentation of national governments. Interestingly, when dealing with the problems such a...

This chapter covers the Nordic member states Denmark, Finland and Sweden, as well as the “associated” countries Norway and Iceland, although the latter are not formal members of the EU. It follows the general template by presenting the history and politics of the European issue in these...

Committees linking national administrations and the EU level play a crucial role at all stages of the EU policy process. The literature tends to portray this group system as a coherent mass, characterised by expert-oriented ‘deliberative supranationalism’, a term developed through studies of...

An organisational approach to European integration focuses on individual actors’ organisational context in order to account for their behaviour, interests and identities. Intergovernmentalists usually preclude any profound impact of EU institutions and organisations. Institutionalists (other...

This paper outlines an organization theory of political integration among nation-states. If we assume there are existing shared institutions, political integration is here seen to take place to the extent that lines of conflict coinciding with national borders are complemented with cleavages...

The cabinets of the European Commission are seen to play a crucial role in the policy-making process. So far, however, they have in many respects remained ‘black boxes’. In this paper we ‘unpack’ the demographic composition in terms of nationality of the three latest commissions’...

We argue in this article that Europe has in fact had a kind of executive order for centuries but that we only now see that the contours of this order are qualitatively different from the intergovernmental order inherited from the past. We ascribe this phenomenon in particular to the...