The Europeanization of Professional Identity Within the EU Institutions

(Tatiana Bajuk Sencar, Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences & Arts)

This paper will provide an anthropological analysis of the mechanisms of social and professional formation as they are experienced by the first generation of Slovene EU civil servants who joined the EU institutions after the year 2004. The last two enlargements of the EU are significant not only because the much larger number of member states has affected the logistics of decision-making in the EU institutions, but also because the arrival of these states has also significantly increased the cultural diversity that is hailed to be part and parcel of life in the institutions themselves. This analysis will explore the extent to which discourses of professionalism can comprise a relatively neutral site in which new civil servants can express their experiences of what McDonald (1997) defines as "incongruent systems" in the face of potentially different conceptual and behavioral systems as well as a positive official EU discourse of multiculturalism. Furthermore, it will shed light on how differing and overlapping constructs of professionalism represent ground level processes of integration and differentiation that shape daily life as well as shifting formations of European identity in the expanded EU institutions.