ABSTRACT
Before we touch upon this book’s main objective — to find out more about how Dutch national bureaucrats ‘do EU business’ — we first have to answer the obvious question: who are these people? How many officials in Dutch national government ‘do European business’ on a more than incidental basis? And which organisations within the Dutch public service do they tend to work for? Perhaps surprisingly, this obvious question has never been answered before. On the individual level, we do not know how many Dutch civil servants are involved in EU-related activities and what kinds of activities they are involved in. On the organisational level, the questions include how EU-related activities are embedded in different parts of Dutch national government and how EU-related work is managed and facilitated organisationally.
