Culture or Social Domination ? New Internal Battles and the Integration of the New Comers from Enlargement into the Commission

How have the agents coming from new member-states been integrated within the EU Institutions? This question has long been understood as a cultural and political issue: how people coming from an administration developed on the east of the iron curtain will fit into an administrative culture built in on the other side. The recent work from Carolyn Ban (2013) about the European Commission gives an interesting new input in showing in and out-group issues were the major points of tension in an administration which was at the same time being  transformed by administrative reforms. The purpose of this presentation is to build on this hypothesis and therefore to emphasize more broadly the definition of culture as a social power and domination issue. The point will be that the problem of integration for many eastern newcomers is, as for others before them, that their position is mainly dominated within the field of eurocracy, which has an effect on their strategies, both for contest as well as for joining the bandwagon of the neo-managerial and liberal model. For developing this hypothesis, I will use empirical evidence drawn from different work (sociology of the highest civil servant, concours, OSP).