European Union transgovernmental networks: The emergence of a new political space beyond the nation-state?

Does the European Union (EU) represent a new political order replacing the old nation-states? The assessment of the real character of political orders requires the identification of political key actors and of the specific structure of their interactions. Transgovernmental networks have been considered to be one of the most important features of EU integration. Unfortunately, the network structures, processes and the impact of these informal horizontal inter-organisational relations between nation-states are mostly unknown. The main objective of this article is to measure and explain the selective pattern of informal bilateral relations of high officials of the EU Member States' ministerial bureaucracies on the occasion of an EU Intergovernmental Conference. The quantitative data used rely on standardised interviews with 140 top-level bureaucrats. The statistical estimation of network choices is based on recent developments of exponential random graph models.