The Europeanisation of the Cyprus central government administration: the impact of EU membership negotiations

Abstract

The paper examines the impact of European integration on the central government and ministerial bureaucracy of Cyprus. The formation, procedure and performance of the Cyprus central government administration is analysed in reference to ‘Europeanisation’, defined as the ‘shift of attention of all national institutions and their increasing participation—in terms of the number of actors and the intensity—in the EU decision-making cycle’. Thus, ‘EU Europeanisation’ is about the resources in time, personnel and money directed by current and future Member States towards the EU level. Scholars have identified various mechanisms that induce Europeanisation in states. Drawing on institutionalism in organisational analysis, Claudio Radaelli presents the mechanisms of coercion, mimetism and normative pressures in EU policy diffusion. Christoph Knill and Dirk Lehmkuhl distinguish between institutional compliance or positive integration where the EU prescribes a particular framework, which is imposed on Member States, changing domestic opportunity structures or negative integration which allows for a redistribution of resources between national actors and policy framing or framing integration which influences to the point of modifying the beliefs and the common understandings of domestic policy-makers. Other authors remind us of the judicial review as a mechanism of change while