The General Secretariat of the Council’s Staff and Neo-managerial Reforms: Navigating Between ‘Desingularisation’ and ‘Dedifferentiation’

This chapter aims to draw up a political sociology of the General Secretariat of the Council’s (GSC) staff. In the first part, we demonstrate that the GSC’s staff epitomises a particular variation of the European civil service shaped by a threefold process of social identification. In the second part, we aim at exploring to what extent the 2016 New Public Management reforms have been eroding this singularity. We argue that these administrative changes are encompassed within a twofold movement: first, a movement of ‘dedifferentiation’ similar to the one that the European Commission underwent and which challenges the autonomy gradually gained in the EU bureaucratic field (Georgakakis, European public service in (times of) crisis. A political sociology of the changing power of eurocrats. Springer, 2019, Revue française d’administration publique, 181(1), 5–11, 2022); second, a movement of ‘desingularisation’ which tends to sociologically challenge the singularity of the Council as an institution deeply rooted in diplomatic culture.