An academic look at the Council Secretariat

Careful readers of this blog will have noticed that I am quite interested in the work of the EU Council, especially because there is a lack of attention on the work of this institution, and so I'd like to share some academic insights about the EU Council's secretariat that a fellow political scientist, Hylke Dijkstra, has published in recent time.

It is true that there is hardly any attention to the Council's bureaucracy with its more than 3400 staff members* (that is more than 10% of the Commission staff); when the Council is in the focus, attention usually is on the member states, their ministers and diplomats or on the rotating Council presidency but not on those people who facilitate and influence the work of the Council in the background.

Hylke Dijkstra thus takes a look behind these coulisses of Brussels, a look that very few academics have done so far, and it's fascinating to read.

I was made aware of Dijkstra's research through his newly published scientific article "Explaining variation in the role of the EU Council Secretariat in first and second pillar policy-making" (full text only with subscription) in the latest issue of the Journal of European Public Policy, a leading political science journal especially regarding EU affairs.

In his article, Dijkstra does not only give a short and concise summary of the evolution of the Council secretariat but also shows that the ways the secretariat is involved in different policy areas differs significantly.

He concludes that in the fields of the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) - the second pillar - it has played a much more substantive role than just being a "secretariat" that facilitates continuity and decision-making between the member states in the Council. It was able to set the agenda, even in its own self-interest, and could thus influence the evolution and course of the Union's foreign and security policy more than the member states-focused approach of the media was able to tell us.

As usual, this is part of continued academic work, and not the first article published on that matter. For example, Dijkstra's article "The Council Secretariat's Role in the Common Foreign and Security Policy" (linked: pre-submission version) has been awarded the prize for the best article of 2008 in the European Foreign Affairs Review.

In another paper (accessible) from 2008 he has analysed the rivalries between the Commission's bureaucracy and the Council Secretariat by showing how the respective competencies in the field of foreign affairs have evolved over time. This is also great background knowledge for observers of the development of the new European External Action Service (EEAS), because it puts the present discussions about the "unification" of EU foreign policy into a historic perspective of division and overlap, co-operation and competition.

I myself have blogged in the past (quite polemically, I admit) about the legal service of the Council, and I think the role the Secretariat played and plays both in foreign relations as well as in other substantive areas of EU politics should not be underestimated. For anyone interested in more details it may thus be of interest to go through the publication list of Hylke Dijkstra and to take note of the few other academic publications on the Council Secretariat that he quotes in his papers.

On a side-note: When I passed by the Secretary General of the Council, Pierre de Boissieu, last week on a public place in Brussels, I could be sure that people around wouldn't even notice him and the powers he has. But you could feel his presence and the presence of his secretariat when he walked by, tall and concentrated.

De Boissieu will be in office for exactly 13 more months, and with the creation of the EEAS the powers of his secretariat will become smaller, given that only some 50 officials of those dealing with foreign and security affairs will remain in the Council structures (figure is from Dijkstra). It will therefore be quite interesting to see how the role of the Council Secretariat will change once it has lost parts of its competencies and once the long-time Brussels insider de Boissieu will be replaced by the "outsider" Uwe Corsepius.

Altogether, academic works like that of Dijkstra are much appreciated because they offer us a view beyond that of daily news while keeping an eye to what is actually relevant for daily politics - political science at it's best**.

* This figure is from the 2009 EU General Budget (via Dijkstra); in the 2010 budget [p.111] the figure is >3500 for both EU and European Council.

** "At it's best" is meant regarding substance and focus. I won't bother you with the questions I have regarding research methods.

Political science blogging: Why Germans support EU membership

This post is based on the conclusion - following a short exchange of views with Kosmopolit some weeks ago - that I should not only contribute as a European citizen to European debates, but also as a political scientist with an interest in EU affairs.

Whenever I will find interesting analyses I will thus try to provide you with latest results and debates from academic journals and other publications:

In a freshly published article titled "Sources of EU Support: The Case of Germany" from the political science journal "German Politics" (issue 4/2009), authors Angelika Scheuer and Hermann Schmitt have presented their analysis on why Germans support EU membership.

In their study based on independent aggregate data sets for a period of 39 years they analyse how the economic situation, the amount of EU legislation implemented, and the general satisfaction with democracy in Germany affects the support of Germans for EU membership.

Their main findings are that although all three factors have an impact, the economic factor is the least relevant; a higher GDP only has a small positive affect on satisfaction with EU membership.

More important seems to be that they find that the stronger the impact of EU policy making, the lower the support for EU membership, and that the more satisfied Germans are with their own political system, the more supportive they are of EU membership. Both effects have a similar strength, with the latter being slightly stronger.

I won't go into possible critiques of the analysis - because there would be some - but the findings are still interesting enough for further political and scientific debate.

And so, although these findings, according to the authors, are not generalisable for other EU countries, they still show that satisfaction with EU membership is not just influenced by how citizens view the work and concrete impact of the Union, but also by the perception of and satisfaction with their own country's system, still the main political arena for most.

A critique of "Women's Political Representation in the European Union" by Johanna Kantola

Those of you who follow this blog and my tweets know how much importance I put in women's representation in EU institutions - the latest article on Tarja Halonen or an earlier post on the gender gap in the Commission staff are just two examples.

So with interest I noticed the recent issue (December 2009) of the "Journal of Legislative Studies" and in particular the article "Women's Political Representation in the European Union" by Johanna Kantola.

I was hoping for new insights that go beyond the obvious - women are underrepresented both in the member states and in the EU institutions - something that explains more in detail the dynamics that keep women out of the relevant EU jobs.

But the article is about nothing but the obvious: It mostly presents already existing descriptive statistics, it summarises some of the existing scientific literature on why women are underrepresented in political institutions and it lists some possible reasons why one might be interested in changing this.

This article has no added value in a debate, its just telling what we all already know. It doesn't explain anything, it strings together figures that aren't really new, just newly assembled. And it doesn't even have the intent to do more:

"The contributions of the article are empirical and consist of an account of the EU policy on gender-balanced decision-making and numerical presentation of new data on women in political decision-making in different EU institutions."

Looking at where we are in the debates today - bloggers and Twitterers lobbying for women in top EU jobs while Barroso asks governments to nominate women Commissioners - this article sounds light-years behind.

It should have answered why, despite the impression that there is pressure for more women candidates, in the end there are no women brought forward at the crucial stages of selection processes (like Milliband and Van Rompuy now looking to be the only two real candidates for EU "Foreign Minister" and European Council President).

A scientific analyses would be of added value if it could show why women who are official or unofficial candidates for some time disappear from the shortlists later on. Is it because in complex political and regional balances of posts the male majority is not able to fit in qualified women candidates or is it because they think the women candidates are not qualified? Is it because women in power - apart from Margot Wallström - don't support women candidates or because women candidates are never presented by man?

Kantola even takes a short look at women's representation in COREPER I and II, but finding out that women are underrepresented there just tells us that there are probably too few women climbing up to the top diplomatic ranks. By knowing this we haven't learnt anything about the mechanisms that lead to this imbalance. So why aren't women in the upper diplomatic ranks or, if they are there, why aren't they promoted to COREPER I or COREPER II?

What are the real mechanisms? How do they differ between the different institutional settings? Can the same institutional design lead to different representation of women in EU institutions? Do positive dynamics in one member state influence the dynamics in a second member state through personal relations developed in the Council? So many questions, so few answers given by fellow political scientists. Nothing about real mechanisms, just numbers and wild guesses.

This would be my pleading:

Social scientists, political scientists, students of feminist and gender studies, tell us more about the real mechanisms, show in comparative perspective how one could advance gender balance within EU institutions, reprocess unlikely success stories and stories where likely female candidates are dropped. Because those of us in favour of gender balanced power distribution need to know where to "attack", which small or large wheels we need to turn, which level of the hierarchy we need to go to to get the results we want.

But writing descriptive articles about known facts - no matter if the data is presented as "new" - doesn't help at all, it just lowers the interest in the subject, and the next time I will see at title like "Women's Political Representation in the European Union" I might think twice before spending time reading it.

The Journal of European Public Policy: Blatant mistake in the current issue

One might think that peer-reviewed political science publications should not contain blatant factual mistakes.

However, in the freshly published issue 6 (Volume 16/2009) of the Journal of European Public Policy - one of the most important political science journals on EU affairs - there is an article by Sabine Saurugger (pp. 935–949) titled "Sociological Approaches in EU Studies" where on page 941 you find the following sentence:

"[T]he hypothesis of a creeping depoliticization of the EU is questioned, not only since the rejection of the Lisbon Treaty by the French and the Dutch but already between 1980 and 1990."

Since you readers are EU geeks, you will have immediately noticed that the French and the Dutch have rejected the Constitutional Treaty, not the Lisbon Treaty, which was rejected by the Irish.

This obvious mistake is the more remarkable if one considers that several notable scientists have read the article before it was published, including the peer reviewer:

"The author would like to thank F[.] Mérand, O[.] Rozenberg, A[.] Menon, the anonymous reviewer, and in particular Berthold Rittberger for their extremely perceptive comments on earlier versions of this article." (footnote 1)

I'd say that such a mistake is neither the best advertisement for a peer-reviewed journal nor for the scientist involved in and around the article.

I hope that this is not a general indication of the quality in peer-reviewed journals but just a mistake that happened in the current hype around the Lisbon Treaty ratification...