Supranationalization through Socialization in the Council of the European Union
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It is an academic truism that enlargement affected the functioning of the European Union and its institutions, and that effects of enlargement are especially noticeable in the Council and its sub-structures. Many researchers expected procedures in the Council to become more intergovernmental and decision-making to become more complicated. However, enlargement also contributed to institutional change in the Committee of Permanent Representatives in quite another—unexpected—way: it strengthened the influence of supranational and “quasi-supranational” actors within the Council, such as the Commission, the Presidency and the General Secretariat, and it made decision-making considerably easier in cases where profound national interests of the newcomers were not directly concerned. Four institutional mechanisms can be identified that contributed to this unexpected institutional evolution: The mechanism of socialization, the mechanism of specific and unspecific reciprocity, the mechanism of lack of interest and the mechanism of presidential impartiality. These mechanisms helped to overcome the cleavage between old and new as well as to uphold the strong and often cited esprit de corps within the Council and its preparatory bodies. The paper analyzes these processes and tries to answer the question: how did these mechanisms contribute to a kind of supranationalization of the Council and its substructures after the last rounds of enlargement? The analysis is based on 51 semi-structured, intensive interviews with experts from the Council General Secretariat and from member states’ Permanent Representations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".