Previous research on the role conceptions and identities of national civil servants involved in EU policy-making was premised on an assumption of distinct levels of government: the national and the European. This led researchers to ask questions about the impact of European integration on national identity and to investigate the roles that civil servants adopted in the face of contending loyalties and competing interests. The results were often inconclusive in the sense that neither a full Europeanization nor a complete retention of national identity could be detected. In fact, premised on the same dichotomy of a sharp delineation between national and European levels, little could be said about the qualitative impact on role-conceptions of civil servants caused by the interaction in the post-sovereign setting of EU policy-making.
A more fertile approach to investigate the role conceptions of civil servants and their behaviour in EU policy-making is to consider the EU’s political processes as inter-communicative arenas in which national and European civil servants interact. In these arenas, civil servants establish constituent rules concerning appropriate behaviour which are not solely decided by national and European norms, but specific to the context. In other words, roles are considered as being simultaneously embedded in European and national governance structures. This approach is in line with the post-sovereign perspective of European governance where the boundaries between national and European levels evaporate and a new multilevel polity emerges. Member states, however, do not disappear but adapt their sovereign rule and rearrange their political processes in the face of this context. Subsequently, new material and ideational conditions materialize which in turn influence civils servants’ role conceptions.
This paper addresses the conceptual challenges of the ‘Member state theory’ in regard to the identities and roles of civil servants engaged in a post-sovereign policy-making context in the EU. The aim of the paper is to revise the conceptual apparatus in line with the specific type of post-sovereign rule that the ‘Member state theory’ establishes. The focus is on how the material and ideational conditions of policy-making, the mechanisms of socialization and identity-(trans)formation, and the cognitive understanding of agency impact on civil servants’ role-conceptions. To clarify the analytical concepts, I use the example of Swedish civil servants’ interaction within the arenas of EU policy-making. Moreover, I investigate conceptually what the shift from a traditional view on the relationship between the European and national levels entails for our understanding of the self-conceptions and perceived roles of Swedish civil servants. Finally, I highlight the impact of EU policy-making on the traditional non-politicized professional character of the ideal-type Swedish civil servant and the organizing principle of dualism in the light of the ‘Member state theory’.
