Organisational Analysis of a Europeanisation Process: A Dutch Experience

What kinds of capacities have ministries been building up in order to manage their EU affairs? How effective has training been in Europeanisation processes? Are more structural/organisational changes needed within Ministries? This book reports on a process of building capacities for managing EU affairs within one ministry (the Dutch Ministry for Economic Affairs). The Europeanisation process in this ministry has been followed during the nineties. Even though being about one specific ministry, the study is set up in such a way that it offers generalisable insights into the kinds of capacities needed for managing European affairs. In this respect the period of study is interesting: At the start of the 90s both the EU and Dutch thinking on the EU were in flux. Moreover, around 1990 there was great unclarity as to whether and how organisations should and could be adapted to the widening and deepening of European integration.
The main conclusion from this book are that training has been major instrument in this ministry - as it has been in many other ministries within the EU. However, the underlying assumptions that officials should no longer make a distinction between 'what is national policy and what is EU policy' and that they have to 'think European' appears to be dangerous. Clearly, these expectations are too high. On the one hand, officials have national objectives, national incentives and national networks which rightly force them into more national ways of thinking. On the other hand, the strength of the foothold the EU acquires within a ministry depends on broader organisational changes and more structural adaptations. One particular conclusion is that there has been an emphasis on decentralisation (officials having to incorporate EU dimensions themselves) whereas in addition there need to be simultaneous strengthening of EU capacities at the central level of the ministry. This would also contribute to the EU become a stronger political topic in the ministry.
This book presents the model on which these findings are based. This model may also serve as a tool for diagnosing EU capacities in other ministries