Conclusion

Abstract

Developing from the early nineties onwards there is by now a rich literature analysing and demonstrating the opportunities for the supranational bureaucracies of the EU to influence European policy-making substantially and beyond their formal tasks and competences (e.g., Cram 1993, 1994; Donnelly 1993; Heritier 1999; Egeberg 1999; Stevens and Stevens 2001; Pollack 2003; Beach 2005). Whatever the ontological and epistemological differences between these contributions to the ‘Public Administration Turn’ in EU studies (Trondal 2007), they typically suggest that the informal power or ‘agency’ of the supranational bureaucracies is primarily based on informational asymmetries that privilege ‘Brussels’ and on the expertise to exploit these asymmetries. No wonder that Moravcsik, a staunch advocate of inter-governmentalism, has challenged those who invoke the notion of ‘informational asymmetries’ as evidence for the explanatory power of supranationalism to come up with a much more precise explanation of the circumstances under which informational asymmetries arise and impact policy-making in the EU (Moravcsik 2005). One does not have to buy Moravcsik’s claim that only a rationalist ‘micro theoretical’ model of the transformation of information into decisional power can do the job to appreciate the more general (and seemingly simple) question his critique suggests.