National Coordination of European Policy: The case of Norway

The purpose of this paper is to examine the national coordination of European policy in Norway. We focus on the machinery of coordination that has been established in Norway and how or to what extent there have been any changes in the last decade or so. Norway is a closely associated non-member, and this important difference in formal status from member states matters to the machinery of coordination. Thus, we start by spelling out the formal agreements that form the basis for Norway’s relationship with the EU, certain political particularities, and the relationship between politics and administration - all of which mark Norway’s situation of very close affiliation without EU membership. With that as a background, we are in a position to examine the relevant dimensions of coordination in the machinery of the Norwegian government. The paper assesses the thesis that Norway’s relationship to the EU is, in overall terms, more aptly seen as administered than as politically governed. We assess the mode of affiliation to consider how much scope it leaves for Norwegian political influence on the EU regulations that Norway incorporates. There are many grounds for assuming that the general situation is one of ‘leave it to the administration’, and we will examine how and to what extent that permeates all relevant aspects of Norway’s coordination of EU policy.