Abstract
In her book Gamze Tanil tries to explain the relationship between Norway and the European Union through the lenses of both selected national (ministerial elites) and transnational civil servants (working in Brussels at the Norwegian Delegation to the EU) who belong to five selected policy areas where both Norway and the EU have had strong interests for some time, namely foreign and security policy (FSP), justice and home affairs (JHA), energy policy, agricultural policy and fisheries policy.
In the introduction, the author presents the main research questions, the aim of the study, the theoretical framework and methodology of the book. In the second chapter, she explains the social constructivist fusion perspective in detail. I felt she should have also discussed Europeanisation theories in more depth in this chapter, but unfortunately they are mentioned only briefly and the author instead largely focuses on the social constructivist fusion perspective.
In the following five chapters, Tanil analyses the five most important policy areas for the past, current and future relationship between Norway and the EU. After giving a short historical background for each area, she analyses the national and transnational Norwegian elites' answers to the questions she asked. According to these empirical findings, while in the FSP and JHA areas civil servants see that Norwegian and EU policy objectives and methods are mostly similar and that there is no need for ideational learning, in the energy, agricultural and fisheries policy areas Norwegian and EU policy objectives and methods are seen to be mostly different, so both sides should learn from each other. In the conclusion, the author gathers all the empirical findings of each policy area together and highlights several factors for the future membership of Norway in the EU.
To sum up, I think this book should be read by students and scholars of European studies due to its interesting topic, but I also think that it has some limitations in its methodology. For example, the author bases the book mainly on the answers of national and transnational civil servants, but I think that the sample is really too small to share their empirical findings at the end of the book or to draw a numerical conclusion from the answers. Apart from these methodological problems, this carefully written book is worth reading in order to look at Norwegian–EU relations from the Norwegian elites' point of view.