AT You have worked extensively on EU-related issues. Tell us about your research and principal findings in this area. CS: My first fieldwork in the EU in 1992 explored the European Community's evolving 'cultural policy'. The principal finding was that European policy-makers were actively engaged in inventing new symbols for 'Europeanness' through the ingenious use of EC-funded 'cultural actions'. Although typically denied, this instrumental use of cultural policy as a tool to promote the EU's integrationist agenda bore striking parallels with the strategies and techniques used by national elites in the formation of European nation-states during the 19th century. Marc Ab6l1s (2000) has shrewdly observed that the EU suffers from a paucity of rituals and symbols when compared to Europe's nation-states. However, this lack of symbols underlies a more fundamental problem: the EU's chronic lack of cultural legitimacy and popular consent. Despite enormous advances towards economic and legal integration, there is still little tangible sense of belonging or shared identity among the putative citizens of Europe. I concluded that EU attempts to forge a European identity were primarily motivated by its search for legitimacy and its need to create a European people (or 'demos') without which the EU's political system will continue to be perceived as fundamentally undemocratic. My later research focused on EU civil servants and the 'organizational culture' of the European Commission. My guiding question was whether the EU had succeeded in creating within its own institutional heartlands the kind of 'European identity' and culture espoused in its literature. A secondary aim was to test the hypothesis that once appointed, EU civil servants would undergo a cognitive change and become progressively more 'Europeanist' in their allegiance. As I discovered during fieldwork, the local idiom for this process was the French term engrenage (meaning 'gearing' or 'enmeshing'). I found that national officials had indeed melded traditions to create a uniquely complex institution a veritable 'culture of compromise' as Ab6l6s, Bellier and McDonald have variously portrayed it (Ab6l1s et al. 1993, Ab6l1s & Bellier 1996, McDonald 1996). Just as Jean Monnet predicted, the Commission's institutional structure has functioned as a laboratory for the formation of a new type of European identity and subjectivity. However, I also discovered a more negative dimension to this. Those very qualities that were once encouraged and esteemed in EU officers (Euro-idealism, political connections, flexibility, entrepreneurialism, distance from national public, elitism, sense of 61an etc.) had also given rise to what insiders termed the Commission's 'parallel system of administration', a system based on 'pragmatic codes' with little respect for due process. The consequences of this were clearly evident in the 1999 Committee of Independent Experts' report into allegations of nepotism, fraud and mismanagement in the Commission. These findings invite us to rethink the concept of 'supranationalism' and view integration from a class and materialist perspective. What we are witnessing in the Commission is the transformation of a category into a group with its own self-interests and political identity. The implications of an increasingly unaccountable Brussels-based transnational elite that is transforming itself from a 'class in itself to a class for itself' raises fundamental questions about the future of democracy, citizenship and governance in Europe. MA: From 1989 to 1992, I did field research on the European Parliament. I think this was the first ever anthropological study of the EU, which at that time was still known as the European Community. I undertook the study of a European institution because, as a political anthropologist, I was interested in how politics is conducted at a transnational level. How does it work in this kind of multi-