‘The European Commission is Merely a Delegated Agent of Member-state Governments.’ Discuss (original) (raw)
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Governing at the frontier of the European commission: The case of seconded national officials
West European Politics, 2006
Studies of executive institutions have largely dealt separately with national and international executive institutions (IEIs). This study unpacks and repacks four conflicting decision-making dynamics that unfolds at the frontier of IEIs -that is, at the institutional rim where national and international executive institutions meet, interact and collide. The empirical laboratory utilised is seconded national experts in the European Commission. The survey and interview data presented demonstrates that the decision-making behaviour of seconded national experts includes a mix of departmental (portfolio), epistemic (expert) and supranational behaviour. The suspicion early voiced by Coombes (1970) that seconded national experts to the European Commission are highly conscious of their national background and that they represent domestic Trojan horses into the European Commission is severally challenged by this study. Arguably, the decision-making dynamics observed at the frontier of the Commission seem less affected by the member-state administrations and the international organisation in which the Commission is embedded, and strongly by organisational characteristics of the Commission itself.
Journal of European Public Policy, 2012
There is a large literature on Member State influence in the European Union, typically focusing on a combination of preferences of the Member States and their strategies with an emphasis on Council negotiations. However, prior to Council negotiations Member States also seek to influence the Commission's development of legislative proposals. This article argues that Member States need scientific expertise, experiential knowledge and target group support to make this strategy work and that the availability of these resources is partly shaped by domestic institutions, such as the territorial organization of the state, the recruitment principles of governmental departments, and the structure of government's relationship with business groups and societal interests. As a plausibility probe for our argument we have conducted a case study of the Dutch government's strategy regarding the Regulation on Chemical Substances (REACH).
The High Representative and EU Foreign Policy Integration
The High Representative and EU Foreign Policy Integration, 2018
European Administrative Governance The series maps the range of disciplines addressing the study of European public administration. In particular, contributions to the series will engage with the role and nature of the evolving bureaucratic processes of the European Union, including the study of the EU's civil service, of organization aspects of individual institutions such as the European Commission, the Council of Ministers, the External Action Service, the European Parliament, the European Court and the European Central Bank and of inter-institutional relations among these and other actors. The series also welcomes contributions on the growing role of EU agencies, networks of technical experts and national officials, and of the administrative dimension of multilevel governance including international organizations. Of particular interest in this respect will be the emergence of a European diplomatic service and the management of the EU's expanding commercial, foreign, development, security and defence policies, as well as the role of institutions in a range of other policy areas of the Union. Beyond this strong focus of EU administrative governance, the series will also include texts on the development and practice of administrative governance within European states. This may include contributions to the administrative history of Europe, which is not just about rules and regulations governing bureaucracies, or about formal criteria for measuring the growth of bureaucracies, but rather about the concrete workings of public administration, both in its executive functions as in its involvement in policy-making. Furthermore the series will include studies on the interaction between the national and European level, with particular attention for the impact of the EU on domestic administrative systems.
JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies, 2007
Schmidt's book is a valuable and well-written contribution to the analysis of the impact of European integration on national democracies. According to the author, democracy has become an issue for Europe and the suspension of the ratification process on the Constitutional Treaty, following the failures of the referendums in France and the Netherlands, shows that it will remain a problematic issue in the near future. The institutional reforms envisaged in the Constitutional Treaty may reduce the problem of EU democracy, but they would not solve the democratic deficit at the national level. The problem at stake refers to Europeanization, which means that national conceptions of democratic power and authority, access and influence, vote and voice remain mostly unchanged. National leaders have failed to initiate ideas and discourse that would engage national publics in the discourse about the EU-related changes to national democracy. Therefore, a key question here is 'how should national leaders proceed in such a discourse?' Firstly, they should decide what the EU is, in order to assess what their countries are becoming. Thus, the fundamental assumption of Schmidt's book is the idea of the EU conceived as a regional state. It is a regional union of nation states, where sovereignty is shared with Member States, boundaries are not fixed, identity is understood in terms of 'being' and 'doing', governance is dispersed. Schmidt argues that in such a fragmented democracy, the EU's legitimacy is in question because it is compared to the ideal of the nation state. However, if it is conceived as a regional state, the democratic deficit would not be so great. But the problem is much more significant in relation to national democracy. The author convincingly argues that this is because while the EU makes policy without politics, its Member States realize politics without policy. National citizens have little direct input into the EU policies that affect them. This results in the problems of voter disaffection and political extremism characterizing the EU Member States nowadays. To solve this problem, Member States have to come up with new national ideas and discourse in order to adjust the EU-related changes to the traditional performance of their national democracies. But firstly it is necessary to conceive how institutions affect European democracy at EU and national levels. Thus, Schmidt's book is about the nature of the EU governance system and its impact on national democracies. In Chapters 2-4, the author examines the impact of the EU upon national institutions, taking into account in turn the policy-making processes and the representative politics of the EU and the Member States. A special merit of Schmidt's work is that the author illustrates her argument with examples of four countries: Britain and France, as