Developing a Hybrid Identity? – Understanding the Role Perceptions of Irish Policy-Bureaucrats and the EU Policy Making Process
The literature informs that across the continent of Europe civil servants draw on a number of roles and identities in dealing with EU business. These include officials of functional national agencies (Egberg, 1999), bureaucratic elites developing shared governance beliefs (Radaelli and O’Connor, 2009) and experts whose professional knowledge is shared across multi-level union administration (Egeberg, 2006). Central to these identities is the member state which remains the key point of reference for national officials and supranational loyalties remain secondary. In the Irish case, studies on the Europeanisation of civil service craft generally focus on system wide accounts of how policy making elites engage with Europe and does not reflect deeply on the influence of administrative tradition and individual identity. Irish civil servants are typically regarded as pragmatic, risk averse and retain their neutrality from active participation in politics. Members of government and senior civil servants who are involved in EU negotiations and policy making are viewed as a cadre or boundary managers who translate EU norms policy and practices into the domestic arena (Laffan and O’Mahony, 2007). In the EU policy making process, however, officials are not just acting as national representatives but are encouraged to engage as technical experts. In some instances national officials may be engaging in European policy making by maintaining relationships with other administrative actors, securing a flow of information, discovering problems and negotiating appropriate responses without overt political steering. Further, following decision making at EU level, national officials translate EU policy into action in the implementation phase. Hence, the literature attempts to gain a greater understanding of the role perceptions of the middle-ranking ‘street level diplomats’ (t’Hart et al, 2007), how they approach their tasks and whether there is a difference between how these national officials operate in the EU environment and how their work is implanted within the domestic administration. This paper aims to investigate the identity and role perceptions of the mid-ranking ‘policy bureaucrats’ in central government departments in Ireland whose work regularly brings them into the EU policy making arena. This is an area of research that deserves more attention at national and European level. In relation to the European administrative systems, we need to know more about official attitudes, practices, career trajectories and identities if we are to develop a deeper understanding of the EU-domestic dynamics (Laffan, 2007).
