When Jean-Claude Juncker was nominated as President of the European Commission in the summer of 2014, it made headline news in the British press. David Cameron had long made clear his opposition to Juncker’s appointment, based chiefly on his objection to the Spitzenkandidaten system which had led to the former Luxembourg Prime Minister’s candidacy. The final agreement in the European Council, which saw Cameron and his Hungarian counterpart Viktor Orbán outvoted by a 26-2 margin, was widely cited as an apt illustration of the UK’s marginalisation from the EU’s corridors of power.
Yet for all the late-night interviews and impassioned editorials dedicated to this subject, few commentators stopped to question why Juncker’s appointment really mattered for Europe as a whole. The implications of the decision for the Commission itself—not to mention the lives of the roughly 500 million EU citizens who have a stake in the Commission’s work—largely played second fiddle to how the affair would impact on Cameron’s poll ratings or discussions over the UK’s EU membership. But Juncker’s appointment was important for a far more profound reason: it was the latest development in the six decades of gradual evolution under which the Commission has emerged as one of the truly unique institutions in global politics. It also served as a demonstration of the interinstitutional and intergovernmental rivalries which continue to shape the Commission’s roles and responsibilities within the EU’s organisational architecture.
This evolution of the Commission as an institution has, like most processes of organisational change, been far from linear. While the once humble High Authority of the European Coal and Steel Community has slowly transformed into a body worthy of mainstream media attention, the Commission has also faced a series of pressures which threaten to substantively alter its future trajectory. The sequence of events through which Juncker became the institution’s latest President represents only one of these strands. At the broadest level, there are at least three key recent developments which merit attention.
The first is that since the end of the 1980s, the Commission has been forced to operate in an increasingly politicised and Eurosceptic climate. The last two decades have witnessed the end of the so-called permissive consensus around European integration, with the Danish and French referendums on the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 heralding a new era in which the integration process has become far more politically contentious (Hooghe and Marks 2009). The Commission has held a central place in the debates which have occurred at both the national and the European levels since, sitting at the epicentre of concerns over the EU’s democratic legitimacy, with its status as an unelected institution becoming increasingly harder to justify in the face of scepticism in several states from national electorates (Szczerbiak and Taggart 2008). Alongside challenges to its legitimacy, the Commission has also faced pressure over its accountability, highlighted most notably by the acute institutional crisis which led to the resignation of the Santer Commission in 1999. This has led authors such as Hooghe and Kassim (2012) to argue that since at least the first Barroso presidency began in 2004, the changing political climate has put the Commission under growing pressure to either justify its actions more forcefully or defer to the will of elected politicians, both within national governments and the European Parliament.
Second, in the context of this increasingly politicised environment, the Commission has witnessed the proliferation of new institutional rivals brought on, in particular, by two key events over the last decade: the Lisbon Treaty’s rebalancing of the EU’s institutional framework and the fallout from the Eurozone crisis which began in 2009. Both events have impacted on the Commission, albeit in different ways. In the former case, the Lisbon Treaty’s creation of a permanent President of the European Council, adjustment of the relationship between the Commission and the Parliament, and creation of the European External Action Service (EEAS) have all carried the potential to alter the Commission’s role. In the latter case, opinion has been split between authors such as Bickerton et al. (2015), who argue the crisis has generated a new form of intergovernmentalism at the European level, and others such as Bauer and Becker (2014), who contend that the Commission has emerged as a far stronger institution in the area of economic governance.
Finally, the Commission has also come under a more practical set of pressures related to the size of its human and financial resources. On the one hand, this has emerged from a broadening of the Commission’s responsibilities, of which the completion of the single market and the impact of the successive enlargements which have taken place since 1995 are the foremost examples. On the other hand, the Commission’s resources have become an active political issue in their own right. Anxiety has always existed over the potential for ‘bureaucratic waste’ to emerge at the European level, but since the early 1990s, the issue of how to enable the Commission to meet its obligations, without drastically increasing the size of its staff or associated expenditure, has become a key dynamic underpinning its development.
This book argues that the combined effects of these pressures—the burden of an increasingly Eurosceptic climate which frames the Commission as a ‘problem’ on both legitimacy and accountability grounds, the extent to which this narrative has combined with treaty reform and the Eurozone crisis to alter the Commission’s place within the EU’s political system, and the limits imposed on the Commission’s resources which have resulted from the accompanying political anxiety at the national level—have weakened the Commission and now put the institution at a crossroads in its development.
It also argues that, against the backdrop of the Eurozone crisis, the growth of populist forces in European politics and the military conflicts that threaten stability on Europe’s eastern and southern borders, the need for coherent and effective EU decision-making has never been greater. A strong Commission, capable of implementing EU policy, while also acting as the umpire between competing interests, is a vital component in this process, and if the Commission is to meet these obligations, it will require not only the functional backing of EU policymakers in terms of resources but also sufficient political backing at the national level.
References
Bauer, M., & Becker, S. (2014). The unexpected winner of the crisis: The European Commission’s strengthened role in economic governance. Journal of European Integration, 36(3), 213–229.CrossRef
Bickerton, C. J., Hodson, D., & Puetter, U. (2015). The new intergovernmentalism: European integration in the post‐Maastricht era. Journal of Common Market Studies, 53(4), 703–722.CrossRef
Hooghe, L., & Kassim, H. (2012). The Commission’s services. In The institutions of the European Union (The new European Union series, pp. 173–198). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hooghe, L., & Marks, G. (2009). A postfunctionalist theory of European integration: From permissive consensus to constraining dissensus. British Journal of Political Science, 39(1), 1–23.CrossRef
Szczerbiak, A., & Taggart, P. (2008). Opposing Europe?: The comparative party politics of Euroscepticism (Comparative and theoretical perspectives, Vol. 2). Oxford: Oxford University Press.