Transnationalisaatio, ryhmäintressit ja Suomen EU-neuvottelut

Kirjoittajat

• Timo Kivimäki

Abstrakti

Finland’s membership negotiations with the EU were not a matter in which there was a higher normative code to refer to in all areas of disagreement. Arguments for positions could not be based on any unambiguous “international law of membership negotiations”. Neither did the negotiations take place in a vacuum of norms, where only power could be used as an argument. Instead, the negotiators tried to utilize different sources of normative justification, and the final criterion for the convincingness of an argument was its audience, the community where the argument was presented. Since fragments of the EC/EU and Finnish political administration worked relatively apart from each other and acted as separate professional communities, it seems understandable that the normative and factual bases of arguments differed from one professional culture to another. As a practical implication of this, different arguments managed to convince different professional communities. This study analyses the implications the existence professional groups had on negotiations on agricultural issues by focusing concerning on the roles of the groups of agricultural experts, general bureaucrats and politicians. On the basis of the analysis it can be concluded that professional cultures served as bridges across the negotiation table, but also caused problems, especially in regards to political accountability of political negotiations.