Pre-cooking the European Constitution? The role of government representatives in EU reform.

This paper sheds light on an unexplored phase and a neglected actor in EU constitutional politics: the preparation of Treaty reform by the Group of Government Representatives. Striving to explain whether and under which conditions constitutional decisions in Europe were de facto taken by officials, the paper proceeds in three steps. First, possible functions of preparation in complex negotiations are conceptualized and two conditions for effective preparation are proposed: a preparatory body's issue and process resources as well as consensual pre-agreement. A second section introduces the role of government representatives in preparing EU reform, checks their collective resources against the criteria developed in section 1 and assesses their preparatory agency as strong. Third, I analyse the effectiveness of preparing for Amsterdam, using the negotiations on free movement and flexibility as plausibility probes. The analysis demonstrates that officials play a key role even in the bastion of high politics that is Treaty reform, where the final European Council is only the 'tip' of a long-term negotiation process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]