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Saurugger, Sabine --- "Governing by informal networks? Nuclear interest groups and the eastern enlargement of the EU" [2004] ELECD 34; 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 12

Section Title: Governing by informal networks? Nuclear interest groups and the eastern enlargement of the EU

Author(s): Saurugger, Sabine

Number of pages: 19

Extract:

12. Governing by informal networks?
Nuclear interest groups and the
eastern enlargement of the EU
Sabine Saurugger

INTRODUCTION
Research on interest groups in the EU has long concentrated on their struc-
tured relationships with EU institutions. Since the middle of the 1990s,
however, a growing number of scholars have proposed that parallel to these
formal relationships, informal contacts between individual firms and
European institutions have become more and more important (Green Cowles
1997, Coen 1997 and 1998). Unlike the formal democratic process, based on
highly regulated arrangements of political representation, interest representa-
tion in the European Union has been largely unregulated. As the introduction
to this volume underlines, the clash between highly formalized routines for
decision-making, and the need for continuous negotiation of policies in order
to achieve efficient and successful outcomes, is met with ample opportunity
for networking and forms of informal politics.
Based on a case study of German and French nuclear industry interest
representation in the process of the eastern enlargement of the EU, this chap-
ter will address the general question of relationships between interest groups1
and the European Commission in EU negotiation processes. While a number
of strongly institutionalized business groups exist at the European level in the
field of nuclear energy and are members in the institutionalized and formally
created expert groups around the Commission, the relations between the
nuclear industry and European institutions, in particular the European
Commission with regard to enlargement policies, were characterized by
networks created on an ad hoc ...