The European Commission and Bureaucratic Autonomy

Antonis A. Ellinas is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Cyprus. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University and his B.A. from Hamilton College. He has been a postdoctoral fellow at the Reuters Institute and Nuffield College of Oxford University and a Fulbright Scholar. He studies political organizations and specializes on political parties, the mass media and public bureaucracies. His first book, The Media and the Far Right in Western Europe, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2010. His work has appeared in Comparative Politics, the Journal of European Public Policy and the Journal of Common Market Studies, among others. Ezra Suleiman is the IBM Professor of International Studies and Professor of Politics, as well as the founder and former Director of the Program in European Politics and Society at Princeton University. He received his BA from Harvard University, continued his graduate work at the Universities of London and Paris and received his M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University. Professor Suleiman has lectured and taught at many European universities and was a professor at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques in Paris for more than a decade. He has been a visiting scholar at numerous institutions, including the CNRS (France), Louvain-La-Neuve (Belgium), Nuffield College (Oxford), the European University Institute (Florence) and the University of Turin (Italy). He has received numerous awards from, among others, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the ACLS, the Fulbright Commission, the German Marshall Fund of the United States, the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin, the American Academy in Berlin, the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study and the Collegio Carlo Alberto (University of Turin). Professor Suleiman was awarded the Legion of Honor by President Jacques Chirac for his contribution to French culture and to Franco-American relations. He has published more than ten books on European politics covering areas of policy making, comparative bureaucracy, elites and executive leadership. He has also contributed articles to Time Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, Le Figaro, Le Monde, Liberation and The Wall Street Journal, among others. He serves on the boards of several journals, academic institutions, and think tanks, as well as several corporations.

• 1. Introduction; 2. The autonomy of national and transnational bureaucracies; 3. Surveying top European bureaucrats; 4. Autonomy at the top of the European bureaucracy; 5. Political attempts to alter bureaucratic behavior; 6. Cultural impediments to political control; 7. Custodians of 'Europe'; 8. Bureaucratic attitudes and policy outputs; 9. Conclusion.

“The countries of Europe have been undergoing hard times. Their most innovative achievement, the European Union, has come under increasing scrutiny as citizens deem that integration may be a significant part of the problem. Critics on both the Left and Right worry that Brussels has too much power, and that senior civil servants of the EU need to be held accountable. This book is a study of the politics of the European Commission and is in the best traditions of empirical research. Ellinas and Suleiman’s interviews allow them to establish that European civil servants do indeed share a culture favoring continued integration. They find that political criticism reaffirms the Eurocrats’ supranational convictions, and that the mandarins of Brussels enjoy more autonomy than their political masters in the member states might like. Defenders and critics of the European project will find this study very useful reading.” —Harvey B. Feigenbaum, The George Washington University