Mapping Situations of Conflicting Loyalties in the EU Administrative Space

This paper tackles the issue of loyalty in the particular context of administrative working situations with international character, i.e. in which public servants have to participate in different social institutions beyond national boundaries, each requiring loyal behavior, which may leads to competing expectations. As we argue, the rise of international administrative cooperation, especially in the European Union, challenges the traditional notion of loyalty in public administrations. At the same time, this phenomenon is not monolithic and can take different shapes with the consequence that the resulting loyalty conflicts may vary. The broad range of such situations will be addressed in this paper in supranational as well as in transnational contexts. Based on examples taken from the emerging European administrative space, the authors offer a holistic analytical framework to better apprehend this phenomenon and to understand the existing challenges for individuals in terms of behavior and of institutional rationality. A first framework of analysis introduces the different professional contexts which exist in the European administrative space, whereas the second one deals with the kind of loyalty, organizations may expect from an individual depending on the form of his/her institutional affiliation. A third framework of analysis identifies the different patterns of loyalty conflicts in which public employees can be confronted with in the EU arena, depending on the kind of administrative setting they are involved in.