Organizational overlap has become a ubiquitous feature in many policy domains. To our knowledge, little attention has been paid to the role bureaucrats can play when organizations overlap. In this paper, we are interested in shedding light on the role of international bureaucrats in organizational overlap. We argue that negotiating cooperation between two IOs not only creates new coalition-building opportunities among member states and international bureaucrats, but that it also empowers bureaucratic actors that are more accessible than others. Politics does not stop at the bureaucratic level. Member states that have been interested in principled reciprocity between both organizations can look to bureaucratic actors to push for inter-bureaucratic coordination while at the same time pushing these actors to go beyond their limits to overcome the political obstacles. In inter-bureaucratic relationships, bureaucrats will look for counterparts that are “easy to talk to” with many resources and a good understanding of their own IO rather than pure expertise. This can empower some bureaucratic actors that have not been dominant in a certain policy domain before. We want to take a stab at this question by looking at a particular organizational overlap, the one between the EU and NATO in the field of international crisis management. With regards to the EU-NATO relationship, these dynamics allowed the European Commission to Commission take on a much more active role in the field of European security policy formulation as it managed to convince NATO bureaucrats that it is the most cohesive – and arguably able - counterpart.
