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Hedetoft, Ulf --- "Cultures of states and informal governance in the EU: an exploratory study of elites, power and identity" [2004] ELECD 25; in Christiansen, Thomas; Piattoni, Simona (eds), "Informal Governance in the European Union" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2004)

Book Title: Informal Governance in the European Union

Editor(s): Christiansen, Thomas; Piattoni, Simona

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781843763512

Section: Chapter 3

Section Title: Cultures of states and informal governance in the EU: an exploratory study of elites, power and identity

Author(s): Hedetoft, Ulf

Number of pages: 21

Extract:

3. Cultures of states and informal
governance in the EU: an exploratory
study of elites, power and identity
Ulf Hedetoft

INTRODUCTION
The aim of this chapter is twofold. First, to develop the concept of state
culture, distinguish it from that of political culture, and relate it to the notion
of informal governance. And second, to apply this concept to the EU and its
different types of relations with and impact on the member states. The
concluding section of the chapter attempts to extract the most significant
results of the analysis, but also to point up a number of problems and issues
(both empirical and methodological) that are in serious need of further inves-
tigation along these lines.


STATE FORMATION AND STATE CULTURE IN WESTERN
DEMOCRACIES: CHARTING THE TERRITORY
States are sites of power and authority which historically have served both
elite purposes and broader societal interests. They have always maintained and
legitimated themselves with reference to providing people(s) with security
from outside threats and domestic menaces, to meeting collective needs, to
protecting group cultures and identities, and so on ­ all in the name of some
kind of Allgemeinheit and `general will' (although these concepts derive from
European modernity and are characteristics of the modern bourgeois state).
Historically, they have increasingly become institutionalized and democra-
tized. Max Weber's tripartion of state authority into traditional, charismatic
and rationalistic-legalistic (Weber [1922] 1957) captures a development from
personalized (arbitrary) forms and discourses of power towards more legalis-
tically bounded and possibly ...