Populism challenges our democracies. And populists in governments attempt to transform public administration systems in manifold illiberal ways. This chapter outlines an analytical frame for systematic comparative research on determining how populists attempt to convert public bureaucracies, what are their motivations, and what are their chances of succeeding.  It bridges different strands of scholarship that have remained rather insulated so far. It complements the debate on system transformation and democracy systematically with administrative aspects. The chapter thus offers a path to integrate public administration scholarship in system transformation research by eliciting the role of bureaucracies in reform projects of populist governments.

The complex relationship between populist governments and their bureaucratic apparatus constituted the center of the theoretical and empirical analyses of this book. The concluding chapter synthesises the comparative insights form the chapters and assesses the validity of the theoretical claims of the introduction. It warns that populists in government are not condemned to fail. Populism may well get entrenched in individual political systems. Public administration has a warden role: namely, identifying threats to liberal society and our democratic systems.

PART H IMPACT OF THE EUROPEAN UNION

In your work you may be affected by the European Union (EU). For instance, you may be involved in preparing the Dutch input into EU decision-making, you may be participating in meetings at the EU level or bilateral meetings with colleagues from other member states, or you may play a role in implementing European legislation and policies. Some of these activities are listed in what follows.

• 1. Is your work affected by the European Union?

• ◻ Yes

• ◻ No, go to question XXX.

• 2. Can you indicate the importance of the following activities in your work?

• 3. On average, how many hours per week do you spend on the EU-related activities listed above?

• ◻ ◻ hours per week (go to question XXX if you spend 0 hours per week on EUrelated activities).

• 4. The following statements concern how your employer facilitates EU-related activities organisationally. This may involve training opportunities, career development or managerial support. To what extent do you agree with the following statements?

Representing the ‘national interest’ in Brussels

The senior echelons of the various departments that national Eurocrats work for expect them to make sure their department's view of the world is successfully presented when EU policies are being created (or implemented). To do this job well, Eurocrats need to know about the plans and intentions of ‘their’ Directorate-General at the European Commission early on in the policy process. Furthermore, they need to be able to sense where the Commission is heading with a particular proposal; assess the implications for their department in terms of costs and benefits for the domestic policy status quo; discuss these plans with their colleagues in other units within their own department or with colleagues with related or affected portfolios in other departments; involve external experts and write reports; and finally, determine their department's position with regard to the specific policy issue at hand. Their socialisation on the job and their work routines are geared towards performing these tasks.

The literature on Europeanisation abounds with ‘big picture’ studies of the politics of the European public policy-making process (Wessels and Rometsch 1996; Scharpf 2001; Green-Cowles et al 2001; Featherstone and Radaelli 2003), but there is surprisingly little research on the behaviour of the countless individual officials that lie at the core of the process (Thedvall 2006; Larue 2006). This chapter takes the latter view. It examines how individual Dutch civil servants practice public policy-making for and within European arenas. By employing this focus, we aim to shed a different light on the question of where ‘European’ policy-making ‘happens’ and how – in our case, Dutch – civil servants ‘make it happen’.

We will, however, look beyond just the practices of individual Eurocrats. The strategic interaction with other Eurocrats is part and parcel of a civil servant's work, which includes colleagues from other member countries, their superiors at their home departments, and the officials of the Commission and the Secretariat of the Council. Getting things done in Europe entails a strategic effort to produce timely, coherent and sensible national policy positions, and to build support for these at the European level. Thus, the work of most individual Eurocrats is embedded in two arenas of strategic interaction: departmental and interdepartmental preparation and the co-ordination arenas at the national level; and Commission and Council Secretariat counterparts and arenas at the European level.

Dutch Eurocracy revisited

The research reported in this study was prompted by the widely perceived shift from ‘classic’ to ‘new’ diplomacy in the very design and day-to-day practices of international regimes such as the European Union. We set out to examine what implications the rise of policy-oriented, domain-specific bilateral, as well as multilateral, diplomacy (noted in chapter 1) has had on how nation-states organise their relations with their regional neighbours and the web of international organisations they belong to or are engaged in. By focusing on the case of the Netherlands and its modus operandi in the European Union, we wanted to document how its executive branch practices the art of ‘doing the government's business’ at the international level. Over half a century of deepening and widening European integration has clearly led to an increased involvement of hitherto ‘domestic’ ministries and officials, but how large has this shift been, and what forms has it actually taken? In particular, we sought answers to the following three research questions:

• 1. To what extent are Dutch civil servants involved in EU-related activities?

• 2. How do individual Dutch civil servants experience and practise the craft of policy-making for and in European arenas?

• 3. How and to what extent are these civil servants facilitated and constrained by existing ways of organising European affairs in their respective organisations?

Each of these questions was specified in a number of more specific issues (see chapter 1 and below). In this final chapter, we review the findings regarding each of these issues, which we gathered through a range of complementary research methods. We summarise the main findings of the preceding empirical chapters with regard to each of the main research questions. We will also try to integrate the findings from the two surveys and the two qualitative case studies to draw a number of overarching conclusions. And we will confront our empirical findings with the outcomes of the expert meetings that were held in the final stages of the fieldwork phase of the project. These expert meetings were meant to provide a sounding board for our observations, allowing us to better assess the extent to which they were shared by people working on EU-related matters within a wide range of organisations in central government.

Eurocratic work in the Third Pillar: A different world?

In this chapter, as in the previous one, we will look at European governance through the eyes of people who routinely ‘do it’ as part of their jobs as national civil servants. We want to know how these national Eurocrats operate in international arenas and how this EU-related work is embedded in and facilitated by the organisations they are part of. In chapter 3, we focused on the veterinary policy case, in which the Commission was a crucial actor, driving a highly institutionalised regime of technocratic deliberation and negotiation, which is punctuated only occasionally by politically explosive issues such as BSE and avian influenza. We demonstrated that, in this context, Eurocratic work evolves around a number of key tactics (signalling, frontloading and coalition formation) that allow the main actors to gain and maintain control of the course and outcomes of key dossiers.

In the current chapter, we switch our focus to study Dutch Eurocrats in the field of European police co-operation.