Abstract
This chapter reports on a survey of senior European officials and provides in particular a prosopographical study (collective biography) of the general director and deputy general director of the European Commission. It shows that the European Commission, far from being a moving and unpredictable ‘multi-organization’, can be analysed as a space of relatively structured positions based on the production and the uneven distribution of a partly autonomous ‘institutional credit’. It also reveals the centre of gravity where the most powerful directors-general were located in the early 2000s.
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Notes
- 1.
This chapter was written with Marine de Lassalle, to whom I would like to express my thanks and appreciation, and was originally published in French in a slightly different form in Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales (Georgakakis and de Lassalle, 2007a), which I thank for their authorization to republish it copyright-free. Thanks also to Frédéric Lebaron for his help and comments.
- 2.
In the way functional corruption is analysed by Pierre-Étienne Will (cited in Bourdieu, 1997), as ultimately intended to ‘keep the machine running’.
- 3.
For a broader perspective, see Georgakakis (2001).
- 4.
The other 41% are distributed as follows: 6% have an engineering degree, less than 20% an undergraduate degree and nearly 15% a higher-education degree of undetermined level.
- 5.
This can be read for example in the interviews or the ‘memoirs’ of civil servants or commissioners, who often oppose the European spirit to the national.
- 6.
Such as The European Companion (1991 to 1994), DPR Publishing Ltd., London.
- 7.
On biographical entries as a strategic variation of identity, see also the box in the Chapter 3.
- 8.
- 9.
DG Education and Culture (EAC) is a somewhat separate case. Although it is responsible for popular programmes such as ERASMUS, its position in the symbolic hierarchy of policies has been so far rather distant from that of DG Competition or Regional Policy.
- 10.
The index of mobility between sectors measures the number of professional sectors occupied, whatever the type(s) of career, before first appointment to a post of director-general or deputy director-general.
- 11.
The assertions on education capital still need be confirmed by more exhaustive data on staff diplomas and degrees. It should also be noted that there are more doctors in law in the old and prestigious DGs (RELEX, COMP, Market) and in some more recent ones (Regio), they are just as many as doctors in economics.
- 12.
Resistance from the states was described during an interview with a former DG in Industrial Policy, and is also discussed in Cohen (1995). For the difficulties in embodying a policy politically and symbolically, there are for instance difficulties in having the policy embodied at the highest political level in the case of Fisheries, as discussed in Lequesne, 2001.
- 13.
Statistical questions can be raised because of the narrow population base. When a post can be confused with a single biographical trajectory, any variation is immediately sensitive. At the same time, the effects of political situations are also probably accounted for.
- 14.
For a more general overview of the differential character of this trend depending on the period, the original nationality and the sector, see Georgakakis and de Lassalle (2007b).
- 15.
Post-graduate work in Waters and Forest, for instance, is considered a relatively low rank in the École polytechnique.
- 16.
For the record and regardless of the differences that these terms can cover in the absence of a unified political market, the 1998 summit revealed that 12 out of the 15 countries were under social-democratic government.
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Methodological Appendix
Methodological Appendix
This study is based on a Groupe de Sociologie Politique Européenne database built between 2000 and 2005. It was funded by the Maison Interuniversitaire des Sciences de l’Homme d’Alsace and benefitted from the work of colleagues from the research centre whom I would like to thank, in particular Marine de Lassalle, who co-chaired the project, Valérie Lozac’h, Philippe Juhem, Virginie Schnabel, Sébastien Michon, Willy Beauvallet and again Pierre Nordemann for the statistics part. We extracted from the database all 242 individuals who have occupied during their career a post of director-general or deputy director-general. The number of individuals for whom we have no information on their career prior to appointment is small (21 out of 242). To be able to work on this database, which contains a lot of textual data, we developed a coding system, in particular of the individuals’ careers. The coding of the posts year-on-year informs on the activity sector (private, national public, European Commission, permanent representation – 9 categories), the hierarchy level and the activity sector (overlapping, for the first, with the DG numbers – about 50 categories in all).
Calculated Variables
Based on the information available in the database, we calculated a number of indicators, in particular for the career prior to appointment as director-general or deputy director-general.
Indicators of Career Prior to Appointment
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Share of career specialization prior to appointment: this is the share of the previous known career in the same sphere of activity as that of first appointment as director-general or deputy director-general.
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Number of different spheres of activity prior to appointment. This is the indicator of career diversity.
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Share of career prior to appointment spent in various sectors:
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○ National private
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○ International private
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○ National public
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○ European public (European Commission)
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○ International public
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○ National political and trade-union
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○ European political
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○ European national (permanent representations)
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○ European international (Council of Ministers, General Secretariat of the Council – GSC)
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Principal Component Analysis (PCA)
The variables we used to build this space (active variables) are the 11 variables indicating the individuals’ careers prior to appointment as director-general or deputy (share of career specialization, indicator of career diversity and share of career prior to appointment spent in various sectors). These indicators allowed us to create a space representing the career of the individuals of our database, placing more or less specialized careers and more or less European careers in opposition.
PCA Standard Data
We had 202 active individuals for the analysis because we selected those for whom we had sufficient information on their career. These were the directors-general (or deputies) we used to build our analysis space. We left out Colette Flesch (entered as an illustrative individual), because of the particularity of her career path, which influenced the construction of the space too significantly. Indeed she is the only person in our database of directors-general (and deputies), most of whose career was in European politics (more than 65% of her known career as a MEP concurrently with national or local offices). Including her in the analysis would have amounted to artificially building a second factorial axis around her career profile, to which she would have contributed more than 82% (Fig. 4.7).
Factorial Design
Our search for a threshold between the eigenvalues of the various axes indicated that we needed to study the first 3 axes, which in all assembled more than 45% of the total variance of the scatterplot.
On the first axis of Figure 4.7, which represents nearly 19% of the total variance of the scatterplot, there is a clear opposition between the two variables, ‘part_public_natio_avant’ (share of previous national public) and ‘part_public_euro_avant’ (share of previous European public). This axis thus expresses the two possible types of careers of a director-general (or deputy) before his or her appointment: a career as a national civil servant, or a career within the European Commission.
The second axis, representing 13.62% of the variance of the scatterplot, shows the opposition between the variables ‘part_spé_avant’ (share of prior specialization) and ‘nombre_dg_avant’ (number of previous DGs), the latter being correlated with the variables ‘part_privé_natio_avant’ (share of previous national private) and ‘part_privé_internat_avant’ (share of previous international private). Axis 2 thus shows the opposition between more or less specialized careers, the more diversified careers corresponding rather to careers in the private sector.
The third axis, with a 12.53% variance, is particularly influenced by the variable ‘part_privé_natio_avant’ (partly correlated with the variable ‘part_spé_avant’), which is opposed to the variable ‘nombre_dg_avant’. This axis thus distinguishes rather specialized careers in the private sector (national or international), the more diversified careers having been in other sectors. This axis however is less meaningful for our analysis, and we only present results on this axis when they are remarkable (Figs 4.8).
Distribution of the variables within the space
Illustrative variables
We have a number of illustrative variables for which we wished to know their positioning in this space. This allowed us to find possible correlation relations between our illustrative variables and the construction variables of the factorial space.
The most interesting illustrative variables to study were:
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Nationality: to see the positioning of the various countries in their choices of directors-general (and deputies).
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Transitions in the various DGs: to observe the structural differences among the DGs through the trajectory of their directors-general and deputies.
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Having studied abroad or not, and in what geographical area (Europe, USA or both): to detect the presence of reinforced European or international capital.
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Having transitioned or not in the cabinet of a European commissioner (and in particular a denationalized cabinet or the cabinet of a President or Vice-President): appreciably reinforces the European capital of directors-general and deputies.
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Evolution over time of the career profiles of all directors-general and deputies: to detect the structural evolutions of the European Commission.
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Evolution over time of the career profiles of the directors-general and deputies of the various DGs: to observe the strategy evolutions of the various DGs (staff numbers are between brackets in the graphs; some DGs are not presented, because their staff numbers are too low; in addition, some represented DGs have only a few individuals per period. These graphs are thus rather fragile and must be used only to retrace the main DG evolution trends) (Figs 4.9a, b).
Distribution of the places of study within the space
Classifi cation
For an overall view, we decided to develop a typology of the career paths of the whole of the directors-general and their deputies previous to their appointment. For this we developed a classification of the whole of the individuals, a classification that we then partitioned such that it kept the maximum possible amount of the information on the scatter-plot dispersion (so that each subset is as homogeneous as possible and as distinct as possible from the other subsets). A partition into 9 classes of individuals is thus that which enabled us to have the maximum amount of information.
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Georgakakis, D. (2017). Genesis and Structure of European Bureaucratic Capital: Senior European Commission Officials. In: European Civil Service in (Times of) Crisis . Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51792-6_4
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