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Politics and Culture in Europe

The research programme Politics and Culture in Europe (PCE) seeks to understand and explain the process of European integration and its political, institutional and ideational characteristics. It does so by taking into account the historical and cultural contexts as well as the international, if not ‘global’ context of EU policy making.

The focal point of Administrative Governance focuses on the bureaucratic organisations established by sovereign nation states to facilitate trans- and supranational policy coordination and integration, which have also become politically meaningful actors in their own right. Of particular interest are questions concerning the historical genesis and development of such trans- and supranational bureaucracies and, related to that, the conditions under which civil servants working in or with such bureaucracies are able to exert substantial influence on the content, scope and execution of decisions and policies which formally result from negotiations among democratically elected political actors. Apart from the (multi-layered) administrative structures of the European Union, we also examine the historical role of bureaucracies in the development of modern nation states, and the role and functions of domestic and supranational bureaucracies in the emerging system of global governance. More specifically, the focal point encompasses three overlapping research themes: 

1. The Administrative Governance of European Public Policymaking, focusing on administrative players and procedures in the making of European and international public policies (more information);
2. The Administrative Governance of Multilateral Foreign Policy; focusing on the diplomatic bureaucracies underpinning processes of multilateral foreign policy formulation. Hereby special attention is paid to the EU as one of the most advanced and complex forms of foreign policy cooperation (more information);
3. Administrative Governance in a Historical Perspective; looking at the history of administration through the lens of administrative governance. Administrative history is not just about rules and regulations governing bureaucracies, or about formal criteria for measuring the growth of bureaucracies, but rather about the concrete workings of public administration, both in its executive functions as in its involvement in policy-making in a historical perspective (more information).