The European Commission Bureaucracy: Handling Sovereignty through the Back and Front Doors

Abstract

The bureaucracy of the European Union is an unlikely success story; it has managed to develop a level of activism and an ability to shape policies in member states that appears improbable in the light of its composition, mode of operation and constitutional limitations. The bureaucratic setup of European integration was conceived by Monnet as essentially based on sovereignty – an impermanent core European administration drawing in officials from member states developing frameworks for common policies that member state bureaucracies apply and implement (see Hooghe 2005:37ff). While a more permanent and routinised form of European bureaucracy actually emerged from the Treaty of Rome, it was hardly one based on a centralisation of authority. Moreover, the fragmentation of authority in the European Union (EU) as a whole might at first glance appear to be exacerbated by basic features of the design of the Commission (see Kassim 2003). It is a non-executant bureaucracy reliant on member states for the execution of policies and on member states and others for its technical expertise. Its main power is the power to propose and its recommendations can be turned down or substantially modified by inter-institutional bargaining between the Commission, Council and member states in the shadow of the authority of the European Court of Justice (see Héritier and Lehmkuhl 2011). It is a multi-national bureaucracy in which the principle of merit promotion is at least tempered if not undermined by the principle of securing fair shares among plum jobs for all its member states. The working processes of the Commission appear to be riddled with opportunities for member states to shape what it does.