Contenu du sommaire : Approches anthropologiques et ethnographiques de l'Union européenne (Seconde partie)

What can ethnographic approaches reveal about the Council of the EU's decision-making process? This article explores how ethnographic methods contribute to the study of the Council's inner workings, drawing on a literature review as well as a series of observations stemming from a participant observation stay in an EU permanent representation. While also identifying a series of challenges, the article underlines two main avenues for future ethnographic research of the Council and Member States' permanent representations, namely the study of negotiation practices and EU interinstitutional power dynamics.

This article builds on two field studies, one examining trade defence and the other crisis management, to provide an ethnographic analysis of the practice of criticism within the European Commission. We identify and examine the strategies employed by EU officials to navigate the recurring tensions that define their daily work. These include the interplay between political imperatives and technical expertise, as well as the balance between crisis response and formalised regulations. Rather than characterising criticism as an isolated act of defiance or a symptom of institutional dysfunction, we reveal its pervasive role in routine institutional practices, a dimension often overlooked in scholarly accounts. By focusing on criticisms, the article offers valuable insights into both the actions and thought processes of EU bureaucrats, while simultaneously encouraging a broader reflection on their professional ethos and the challenges it regularly undergoes. To substantiate this argument, our analysis integrates three dimensions: a dialogue between rarely connected literatures, comparative findings from two field investigations, and multi-level observations drawn from interviews, participant observations, and the analysis of draft documents.

Dominant representations of the European Commission suggest that its staff come from an advantaged, mobile and highly privileged “elite”. Extensive fieldwork, however, suggests that this is not the case. In this contribution, after presenting the evolution of the issues surrounding “qualified” migration and the way in which ethnography enables us to understand the experiences at the heart and on the bangs of the European Commission, we will describe the different activities and practices, between the professional and private spheres, of “young” Europeans, temporarily employed at the European Commission in Brussels, a cosmopolitan institution. Based on a mixed survey that took place between 2010-2015 in Brussels, through direct and/or participant observation, interviews and questionnaires, this contribution will focus on the contribution of the ethnographic approach, on the analysis of the experiences and representations of this staff, taking seriously the impact of the social and geographical origins, but also the age and gender effect, which allow us to understand their trajectories, between territorial anchorage and mobility.

This article analyses the access of interest groups to the European institutions. Using an ethnographic approach based on the participation of its author in the negotiations of the “port services” regulation as a lobbyist, it aims at deepening our knowledge of the practices of interest representatives from the “intermittent” pole of the field of Eurocracy (Georgakakis, 2012), i.e. actors who occasionally invest the European administrative and political arena, and whose resources and practices are poorly adjusted to this space compared to those of interest representatives from the “permanent” pole, who are more socialized to the functioning of the European institutions. Our hypothesis is that the practices of intermittent interest representatives, in particular the conditions and modalities of their access to the administrative and political actors of the European Parliament (EP) and the Council of the European Union (Council of the EU), depend on their position in the European administrative and political space.