Who wants a more single market? Competing views of economic integration inside the European Commission

Are the bureaucrats of the European Commission still an ‘engine of integration’ with respect to their classic agenda to build a Single Market, or are they turning away from that core project? In the EU landscape we can see many actors calling for newly interventionist policies, others calling for redoubling efforts to complete the Single Market, and some supporting both at once. This article reports interview research inside DG GROW, the directorate responsible for the internal market, that investigates how the officials tasked with that agenda perceive their work today. Amid new policy challenges, politicisation, and presidentialisation of the Commission itself, we find a divide between two networks of ‘programmatic elites’. ‘Single Market pragmatists’ favour a more targeted, politically-sensitive agenda, while ‘Single Market maximalists’ defend the classic ‘complete’ market project. These views reflect early-career socialisation – tracing to the units where officials began their careers – but then consolidate into commitments that individuals carry through Commission reorganisations and environmental change. These findings suggest that the Commission will continue to feed a mix of proposals into EU policy processes on the Single Market, and that a focus on ‘programmatic elites’ has promise more generally in the study of public administration.