No time to weaken the Commission

Date: 04/04/02

It would be a black day for Europe's future if the doomsayers in the popular press and elsewhere got their way, argues Dick Leonard.

WHO loves the European Commission? Hardly anybody, if you believe the popular press, which customarily describes its members as 'unelected Brussels bureaucrats ', often bracketing this with criticism of their high salaries and the untrue assertion that these are tax-free.

It is not just the press - or large parts of it - which has it in for the Commission. Governments of the member states have often scapegoated it as the cause of their own discontents. Only last week, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder attacked the Commission for having an 'anti-German bias'.

He was following in the footsteps of President Charles de Gaulle, who in 1967 forced the resignation of the first Commission president, Walter Hallstein, in the wake of the controversy over France's 'empty chair' policy, and of the British government of John Major, which tried to blame the Commission for its own mishandling of the BSE crisis.

Even the Blair government, whose attitudes to the European Union have been so much more positive than those of its predecessor, seems to have carried over its low opinion of the Commission. Peter Hain, the UK Europe minister, who is also its representative on the Convention, referred to it dismissively as a mere 'civil service', in a recent speech in Brussels, seemingly oblivious of the important political role assigned to it by the Treaty of Rome.

There is now a risk that pressure will build up within the Convention to reduce that role, to the alleged benefit of either the Council of Ministers or the European Parliament. It would be a black day for Europe's future if that were to happen.

Under the Rome Treaty, the Commission has three main tasks. It has the right of initiative - the sole right to present proposals for legislative action to the Council of Ministers, whose role is to decide, in consultation or co-decision with the Parliament, whether to adopt them.

It acts as the 'guardian of the treaties'. It has to ensure that the member states respect their obligations under the treaties, with the right to arraign them before the Court of Justice if they appear to be in default.

Finally, it has the responsibility of managing common policies adopted by the Community.

The 'founding fathers' of the EU assigned these responsibilities to the Commission because they believed they should belong to an independent body which represented the interests of Europe as a whole. By contrast, both the Council and the Parliament represent sectional interests, however large - those of the member states in the case of the Ministers, and of their constituents in the case of MEPs.

The independence of the Commissioners is underlined by their oath of office in which they undertake 'neither to seek nor to take instructions from any Government or body'.

Though nominated by governments, they cannot be sacked by them.

The future of the Commission is currently being debated in a thoughtful exchange of opinions on the website of the European Policy Centre (EPC).

It was kicked off in a long paper by two former senior Commission officials, John Temple Lang and Eamonn Gallagher.

Their central argument is that it is only the independent status of the Commission which makes majority voting in the Council acceptable to all the member states.

In drawing up its proposals, the Commission has to take into account not only the presumed wishes of the majority, but it also has to build in the maximum concessions possible to meet the objections of the minority. It is only because they are convinced that, in general, they will get a fair deal from the Commission that member states are prepared to accept being outvoted on particular occasions.

The two authors carry their argument a stage further, saying, with great insistence, that this degree of trust in the impartiality of the Commission is only possible because every member state is represented on it. They deplore the provision in the Nice Treaty that once the membership of the EU reaches 27 members, the number of commissioners should be less than the number of member states.

The argument for a smaller Commission is that there are not sufficient worthwhile portfolios to justify a larger membership, that it would be invidious to distinguish between senior and junior commissioners and that what is needed is a small, efficient executive, rather than a large talking shop. Temple Lang and Gallagher retort that the executive role of the Commission is less important than its representativeness, and that its essential function is to be 'a policy-proposing think-tank'.

In my view, these two roles are not incompatible, and I would argue that full representativeness over time should be the objective rather than that all countries should permanently have the right to a Commissioner. The optimum size would be 12, or at most 15 members, with a flexible rotating system among the member states.

The rule should be that no member state should be continuously represented for more than two consecutive five-year terms, and that none should be excluded for longer than two terms.

This would accommodate up to 36 (or 45) countries, which is comfortably above the number envisaged for the foreseeable future. This is no time to think of chipping away at the powers of the Commission. Anyone who doubts this should consider what happened under the Maastricht Treaty, when it lost the power of initiative under the new pillar three on Justice and Home Affairs. With nobody else assuming this responsibility, deadlock ensued. Virtually no decisions were taken, and this exercise in 'intergovernmentalism' proved an embarrassing flop.

The Amsterdam Treaty to some extent repaired the damage by transferring large chunks of pillar three back to pillar one, and restoring the powers of the Commission. Since then things have at last begun to move forward in what has become one of the EU's most important sectors.

Over the years, the performance of the Commission has varied, but there is no doubt that it has been at its best when led by strong presidents such as Hallstein and Jacques Delors. The most positive contribution the Convention could make would be not to consider any diminution of its powers, but how best to foster - perhaps by direct election - the emergence of such strong leadership.

Article examining the future role of the European Commission and the way in which the Convention on the Future of Europe might seek to alter it.