Dutch Eurocrats at Work: Getting Things Done in Europe

The European Union has often been called a one-of-a-kind governance system and an industry of scholars tries to grasp ‘the nature of the beast’ (Risse-Kappen, 1996). Our contribution to this effort is to look at European governance through the eyes of people who routinely ‘do’ European governance as part of their jobs as national civil servants. This chapter reports part of a much larger project that involved intensive case studies of two issue areas — veterinary policy and European police cooperation. The project explores the cases from the perspective of the four relevant Dutch ministries (Interior, Justice, Health and Agriculture), as well as several of their executive agencies. It also includes a comprehensive nationwide survey of Dutch national-level civil servants (see ’t Hart et al., 2008).