Intermittent interest representatives of the port sector: actors at the door of the European Parliament and of the Council of the European Union?

This article analyses the access of interest groups to the European institutions. Using an ethnographic approach based on the participation of its author in the negotiations of the “port services” regulation as a lobbyist, it aims at deepening our knowledge of the practices of interest representatives from the “intermittent” pole of the field of Eurocracy (Georgakakis, 2012), i.e. actors who occasionally invest the European administrative and political arena, and whose resources and practices are poorly adjusted to this space compared to those of interest representatives from the “permanent” pole, who are more socialized to the functioning of the European institutions. Our hypothesis is that the practices of intermittent interest representatives, in particular the conditions and modalities of their access to the administrative and political actors of the European Parliament (EP) and the Council of the European Union (Council of the EU), depend on their position in the European administrative and political space.