Transnational Power Elites. The New Professionals of Governance, Law and Security

This book argues that European Union institutional mechanics and the EU as a political unit cannot be properly understood without taking into account the elites that make the policy decisions.

Spurred by globalisation, technological and economic development has provided the backbone for social and political transformations that have changed the social structures that unite and differentiate individuals and groups in Europe and their interface with extra-European actors. These developments are not only exemplified by the rise of the EU, but also by the rise of a set of transnational European power elites evolving in and around the European construction.

This book maps out these EU and international interdependencies and provides a comprehensive picture of the European transnational power elites. Moving away from the majority of literature on European integration dominated by economics, law, IR and political science, the volume is written from a sociological perspective that takes into account the individuals that make the policy decisions, the formal and informal groups in which s/he is included, as well as the social conventions that regulate political and administrative activities in the EU.

This book will be of much interest to students of EU studies, sociology, critical security studies, and IR in general.

Table of Contents

1. Transnational Power Elites: The New Professionals of Governance, Law and Security, Niilo Kauppi and Mikael Rask Madsen

Part I: Governance
2. The Triumph and Despair of Central Banking, Martin Marcussen
3.The Institutionalisation of the European Administrative Corps as a Transnational Elite, Didier Georgakakis
4. European Diplomats: State Nobility and the Invention of a New Social Group, Rebecca Adler-Nissen
5. Elite Transformations and Diffusion in Foreign Policy: A Socio-Historical Approach to the Emergence of European Power Elites, Karen Gram-Skjoldager and Ann-Christina L. Knudsen

Part II: Law
6. The Genesis of Europe: Competing Elites and the Emergence of a European Field of Power, Antonin Cohen
7. Elite European lawyers? The Common Market as new Golden Age or Missed Opportunity, Yves Dezalay and Bryant Garth

Part III: Security
8.The Transnational Field of Computerised Exchange of Information in Police Matters and its European Guilds, Didier Bigo
9.The European Military Elite, Frédéric Mérand and Patrick Barrette Postscript: Understanding Transnational Power Elites, Understanding Europe in the New World Order, Niilo Kauppi and Mikael Rask Madsen