"The parallel administration of the European Commission: National officials in European clothes?"

This [paper] poses the following question: Does the European Commission manage to transform the loyalties and identities of Commission officials seconded on short-term contracts? Studying the mix of national and supranational loyalties amongst Commission officials is important in order to assess the integrative and transformative power of the core executive of the European Union. Moreover the parallel administration of the European Commission is an important laboratory for studying system integration across the EU/nation-state interface. This study applies an institutional middle-range approach to make conditional assessments on the transformative power of the parallel administration of the European Commission. Making explicit references to operational dimensions are vital in order to determine the conditions under which institutions matter generally, and in order to identify the conditions under which the European Commission contribute to system integration across levels of governance in particular. Further empirical studies, however, are needed to test the conditional validity of the suggested hypotheses. Hence, this [paper] outlines a middle-range research agenda for future empirical studies of system transformation in Europe