The next phase in the Europeanisation of national ministries: Preparing EU dialogues

Article abstract:

Now that national officials are generally familiarised with EU policy, the next challenge in the Europeanisation of national administrations is to better align national policy initiatives with EU policy developments. New national policies have to be placed in an EU context to prevent re-fragmentation of the internal market and to share experience in policy innovations at EU level. Raising policy innovations to EU level ('uploading') requires engaging in EU dialogues to involve colleagues from other Member States and the Commission in the elaboration of policy and discussions on outcomes. Practice shows, for example in countries preparing for the Presidency, that such dialogues are often insufficiently prepared and that the work and resources involved are easily underestimated. As such, too many and premature ideas are being raised by different countries, and one-off workshops are added to the already overloaded EU policy agenda. Therefore, a better selection of viable innovations and a better preparation of EU dialogues are needed. This paper presents a framework for national officials to come to systematically prepared strategies for initiating discussions at EU level about policy innovations.