Reforming the European Commission

Michael W. Bauer

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415466295
• eBook ISBN: 9781317968320
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Relaciones internacionales

Many international and supranational organisations have lately been busy modernising their internal administration. But nowhere has management change received a similar amount of attention than in the case of the European Commission. Although the perception prevails that the Commission has been losing out in recent years, this vivid interest, academic as well as public, in the so-called Kinnock reform suggests that this organisation still remains "at the heart of the Union". The proposition of this book thus is simple. If it remains true that the Commission is an essential part within the (admittedly complex) equation of EU policy-making, changes of the administration basis of this actor are likely to have broader implications. Consequently, this special issue poses three crucial questions about the recent administrative reform of the European Commission: why was such a comprehensive reform possible, what are its specific implications for the Commission as an organisation and what is the likely impact for the policy process?

In short, this book puts the organisational base of EU policy-making centre stage. In the quest for answers the authors of the subsequent chapters take distinct perspectives, use various research strategies and methods, and attempt to solve diverse empirical puzzles. But all attempt to add to our understanding of this organisational base, and how to systematically study it.

This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of European Public Policy.

‘Mission impossible’, but mission accomplished: the Kinnock reforms and the European Commission

Hussein Kassim

INTRODUCTION

The European Commission presents a fascinating case for scholars of administrative reform. While national administrations in advanced industrial societies have undergone periodic and often radical change since the 1950s, the Commission grew in size and complexity but did not undertake major administrative reform. However, having changed little in terms of its main procedures for over 40 years, it implemented a programme of far-reaching change, involving the simultaneous overhaul of personnel, financial management, and planning systems in six years between 1999 and 2005. The accomplishment of such a wide-ranging transformation in such a short timeframe is unusual in the case of any public administration (Pollitt and Bouckaert 2004; Sahlin-Andersson 2002). In those rare instances where far-reaching reform has been introduced at the national level, as, for example, with the ‘Next Steps’ in the UK, change was implemented over a far longer period. At international level, meanwhile, reform has generally been restricted to a limited number of specific areas (Bauer 2007a; Bauer and Knill 2007; Claude 1971; Geri 2001).

A pattern of continuity over four decades followed by a ‘big bang’ of sudden and comprehensive reform is the first of three interrelated puzzles arising out of the Commission's experience. A second relates to the circumstances under which the reform came about and the Commission's response to it. Although the reform and elements of its content were externally imposed on the organization by the European Council and a Committee of Independent Experts (CIE) appointed by the European Parliament ‘to examine the way in which the Commission detects and deals with fraud, mismanagement and nepotism’ (European Parliament 1999), the Commission leadership implemented a reform programme that went significantly beyond what these bodies demanded. In particular, and acting on its own initiative, it extended the reform to sensitive aspects of staffing policy – the very areas in which earlier reform initiatives had foundered. Rather than reacting negatively or attempting to obstruct reform as might have been expected from an organization compelled by outside actors to introduce change, the Commission responded positively by expanding the scope of the reform.

A third puzzle concerns the Kinnock reforms as an instance of successful change.¹ The literature on bureaucracy and institutional and organizational change tends to be sceptical about the prospects of meaningful change, even more about far-reaching reform. Approaches to administrative reform inspired by historical institutionalism (HI) or sociological institutionalism (SI) (see, for example, Brunsson and Olsen 1993; Christensen 1997; Capano 2003), jointly considered as new institutionalism (NI) for the purposes of this article, among other things predict incremental or ‘path dependent’ change.² They tend to assume that the impetus to reform comes from outside the organization concerned, that the pressure to reform is interpreted by the organization in terms of existing norms and values, and that any change is likely to be modest. Applied to the Commission, NI-informed theories of administrative reform would hypothesize at most incremental change, not the wholesale and simultaneous replacement of key systems and procedures.

Micro-level approaches, such as the Weberian orthodoxy (WO), and the classic principal-agent model (CP-A) meanwhile anticipate that change initiated by reform-minded politicians is likely to be blocked by bureaucrats. WO, essentially a theory of bureaucratic power, has been applied by several scholars to explain why reform efforts fail (see, for example, Kellner and Crowther-Hunt 1980; Suleiman 1974; Putnam 1974). Bureaucrats prefer the status quo, dislike uncertainty and will, and are able to, resist changes that threaten their status. CP-A, by contrast, assumes that the preferences of principal and agent diverge, that bureaucrats are the beneficiaries of power asymmetries vis-à-vis politicians (see, for example, Moe 1984, 1989; Weingast 1984), and that an agent instructed to reform will ‘shirk’. Both WO and CP-A would hypothesize that the Commission would regard calls for it to reform as unwelcome and that it would attempt to obstruct any efforts to bring about organizational change.

As well as defying the expectations of leading theoretical approaches, the Commission's experience is at odds with the findings from comparative studies of administrative reform. Most empirical analyses emphasize the pitfalls. They highlight the extent to which reform is gradual, improvised and uncertain, how the original blueprints for change are unlikely to survive to the final stages of the reform process, and the many obstacles that lie in the path of would-be reformers (see, for example, Wright 1994, 1998). Unsurprisingly, they find very few instances of success (Pollitt and Boucrkaert 2004).

The three puzzles outlined above highlight features of the Commission case that make it so unusual. They also identify aspects of the reform that have been neglected in the existing literature. The puzzles are instructive in that they suggest an alternative image of the Commission and an alternative interpretation of its reform to that suggested by a casual reading of the Commission's history and the sequence of events that led to the Kinnock reforms. An organization that had remained essentially unchanged for four decades until forced to change by external action appears prima facie to be arrogant, powerful and oblivious to its failings. The analysis presented below, however, presents a somewhat different picture. It holds that the Commission leadership had in fact long been aware of the organization's weaknesses and attempted on several occasions from the late 1970s to address them (Bauer 2007b). Its lack of success reveals less a self-satisfied and unself-conscious organization than an administration trapped in a reform predicament. The Commission is essentially a dependent institution. Not only are the rules that regulate its staffing and financial management and control procedures set out in legislation agreed jointly by the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament, but the Commission confronts formidable internal barriers that it has found impossible to overcome through its efforts alone. Reform of its administrative systems and procedures requires intervention on the part of member governments and, to a lesser extent the Parliament, but these actors are generally not interested in the Commission's internal administration.

How then to explain the changes introduced under Prodi? This article argues that the Kinnock reforms are best interpreted as a case of self-reform under delegation and best explained in terms of the predicament referred to above. The Commission's ability to undertake reform is constrained by its institutional setting and certain internal characteristics present formidable obstacles that can only be overcome with assistance from national governments. The crisis precipitated by the resignation of the Santer Commission in March 1999 compelled national governments to act and to insist that the Commission implement internal reform – a rare case of intervention in the Commission's administrative affairs by the member states. The European Council entrusted the task of modernizing the organization to the incoming College and thereafter played a limited role in the process. Meanwhile, the Commission took full advantage of the opportunity to act on an internal reform agenda developed over the course of two decades – the ‘opportunist thesis’ – and to address other concerns raised by Commission officials.

A second argument is that the Commission's reform predicament and the very specific conditions under which it was able to implement change present a challenge to the existing theoretical literature. The leading theories begin from assumptions about the source of the desire for reform, the respective preferences of ‘politicians’ and ‘bureaucrats’, and the constraints imposed by the political context that do not easily fit the Commission's case.³ To the extent that the Commission's institutional setting is comparable to that of other international administrations, it suggests that a new theoretical approach may be needed to explain administrative reform in an international context of institutional dependence.

The discussion below is organized in four sections. The first describes the Commission's reform predicament. It argues that, in contrast to ‘normal’ legislation where it can exert varying degrees of influence (see, for example, Pollack 2003; Schmidt 2000), the Commission is severely constrained in regard to the procedures and practices that govern its internal operation. It depends on the intervention of national governments and the European Parliament which only rarely show interest in the Commission's internal administration. The second section briefly discusses reform efforts by the Commission before that date. It argues that though the absence of an external impetus was a major constraining factor in limiting their achievements, the initiatives reveal the Commission leadership's desire to reform the administration and the evolution of an internal reform agenda. Backed by the mandate of the Berlin European Council which convened within two weeks of the Santer Commission's resignation, it argues that the Commission was finally able to undertake wide-ranging reform (the first puzzle).

The third part examines the content of the Kinnock reforms. It points to how the Commission extended the reform programme beyond the areas highlighted by the CIE (CIE 1999b) – the second puzzle – as evidence that the Commission leadership perceived the European Council mandate as a once-in-a-generation opportunity to modernize the organization and how it drew largely on internal diagnoses of the organization's weaknesses and prescriptions for reform. The fourth section considers the factors that account for the success of the Kinnock reforms against the pessimistic predictions of the theoretical and empirical literature (the third puzzle).

THE COMMISSION'S PREDICAMENT

The Commission faces a structural problem with regard to administrative reform, the identification of which is a key to understanding and resolving the three puzzles outlined above. This arises from two conditions which make external intervention a necessary condition for meaningful reform. The first is the presence of obstacles to managerial change inside the Commission itself. The second is the location of decision-making authority with regard to the rules governing staffing and financial management procedures in the hands of the Council and the European Parliament, bodies that show little interest in its internal operation.

Constraints, internal and external

The Commission leadership faces significant impediments in efforts to bring about organizational change. First, the Commission's administrative culture places a high value on policy work, associated by officials with the Commission's role as the motor of integration and its mission to promote ever closer union. ‘Management’ and managerial tasks, by contrast, have typically been regarded as mundane, insignificant, and a distraction from the institution's real work (Hooghe 2001; Laffan 1997; Abélès et al. 1993; Stevens and Stevens 2001). For much of its history, officials – and indeed members of the Commission – have measured their career success in terms of the number and importance of policy initiatives for which they were responsible (Hooghe 1999a, 1999b, 2001). This hierarchy of values is reinforced by the priorities of member governments. They are concerned primarily with policy outputs and actions, not administrative processes. Second, the Commission's multinational composition has not been conducive to concerted action in regard to administrative change or to management more generally. Commissioners and officials drawn from national administrations with very different cultures and values have found it difficult to agree on a diagnosis of the organization's problems and the importance that should be attributed to them, still less on whether and what action should be taken to resolve them (Shore 2000: 198).

The staff unions have also proved to be an obstacle to reform – a third barrier. The Commission inherited the paritaire system from the French and German administrative traditions (Stevens and Stevens 2001: 56–60), where staff representatives play an important role in the running of the administration. The staff unions were well resourced and occupied a privileged position within the organization. Their representatives sat on myriad committees at various levels, taking decisions in regard to working conditions, personnel and other issues. Not only were the staff unions well placed to oppose initiatives which they considered as endangering their status or job security, but they have demonstrated a tendency towards militancy. They have on occasion been able to mobilize mass support among Commission officials to counter reform initiatives.

The dispersal of power within the Commission has been a hindrance – a fourth obstacle. The Commission is a pillarized and fragmented organization that lacks the strong leadership which analyses of reform highlight as important (Pollitt and Boucrkaert 2004: 50, 58–9). Its Directorates-General are ‘baronies’ or ‘fiefdoms’, formally equal, that have priorities and interests that they fiercely protect. Individual departments rather than the Commission as a whole are the focus of loyalty on the part of officials. In such an environment, co-ordination is difficult and leadership precarious. Moreover, the principle of collegiality has acted against an accumulation of power at the Commission's centre. Despite the strengthening of the Commission Presidency since the Treaty of Amsterdam, the Commission President, unlike the head of government in national political systems, does not have the authority to impose organizational change.

The challenge presented by these internal barriers is compounded by the Commission's relative powerlessness in respect of the regulations that govern...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Journal of European Public Policy Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Organizational change, management reform and EU policy-making
• 1 ‘Mission impossible’, but mission accomplished: the Kinnock reforms and the European Commission
• 2 Explaining variation in organizational change: the reform of human resource management in the European Commission and the OECD
• 3 Diffuse anxieties, deprived entrepreneurs: Commission reform and middle management
• 4 Reforming the Commission: between modernization and bureaucratization
• 5 Implementing organizational change – the case of the Kinnock reforms
• 6 European Commission reform and the origins of the European Transparency Initiative
• 7 Enlargement, reform and the European Commission. Weathering a perfect storm?
• 8 Research agenda section
• Index