Endogenous transformation in European public administration: soft-law, transnationally-networked governance as a self-reinforcing trend

Where journals were once full of articles analyzing the process of European integration, they are now full of articles analyzing the EU as a system of governance. This chapter combines these themes, arguing that to understand the process by which the EU is now integrating it has become necessary to understand the EU as a system of governance. More particularly, it asks whether intergovernmental and neofunctionalist traditions, each of which attributes institutional (trans)formations in the EU to the preferences of particular political principals, end up neglecting the impact that their chosen institutional agents — communities of expertise — have on their own (trans)formation. In an institutionalist bent, this chapter asks whether these communities of expertise, successful as they are at embedding themselves in the EU’s existing institutional architecture, also bring their own internal practices to bear upon it.