Council committees in the Government of the EU. Case-study comparisons from the 1st and 3rd pillars
Résumé
Based upon completed research into the way the Council committees operate in five first pillar policy sectors and an ongoing study of their counterparts in the field of internal security, this paper sets out to tackle two wider issues for studies of the European Union. The first concerns the methods of research used to study the involvement of national actors in a "European" mode of making and taking decisions. Whilst recognizing the value of other research methods, the paper defends an approach based upon representative case studies of the production of EU legislation. The second wider issue tackled here concerns the very aim of studying committees. If identifying their characteristics and impacts in different sectors is still more than necessary, we argue that research can be taken a stage further in order to highlight a number of recurrent features that mark the government of the EU as a single, albeit disjointed, form of government.
Basé sur une recherche terminée sur la façon dont les groupes de travail du Conseil fonctionnent dans 5 secteurs du Premier pilier et une recherche en cours sur leurs équivalents du Troisième pilier, ce papier tente d'aborder deux questions relatives à l'étude de l'Union européenne. La première concerne les méthodes d'analyse et défend l'utilité d'analyse de cas qualitative. Le second champ de questionnement concerne l'étude des comités elle-même, nous défendons à ce propos qu'ils sont significatifs d'un mode de gouvernement européen singulier, quoique disjoint.