Convention on the Future of EuropeThe Irish Times debateNo argues Brigid Laffan, of the Dublin European InstituteYes says Anthony Coughlan, of the National Platform
Dr Brigid Laffan
The European Commission is one of the most innovative features of the EU's institutional structure. It consists of the College of Commissioners and a European bureaucracy. The Commissioners are independent of national governments.
The role of the Commission is to make proposals on European laws and programmes that are then decided on by the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament. It manages a range of EU spending programmes and oversees the compliance of the member states with EC law.
The Commission has had a very bad press in recent years. The resignation of the Santer Commission in 1999 as a result of weak budgetary management and the lack of clear political direction by President Prodi, the present head of the Commission, has left it with fewer friends among the member-states. However, small states should not forget the critical role that the Commission plays in promoting and protecting their interests.
It is far better for small states that the power to present proposals lies with the Commission as it has a responsibility to explore European-wide needs rather than the needs of any one member-state. Its role in ensuring compliance provides some guarantee of a level playing field.
No member-state is openly saying that it wants to reign in the Commission but some of the proposals on the table would have that effect. Tony Blair has proposed that the rotating presidency of the Council be replaced by a President of the Council elected by the European Council for a period of five years. He has won the support of the Spanish Prime Minister, Jose Maria Aznar and the French President, Jacques Chirac.
The Franco-German proposals on institutional change allow for the election of the Commission President by the European Parliament and the election of a Council President by the European Council. The Franco-German proposal is a compromise between a German preference for a Commission President appointed by the Parliament and the French desire for a strong president of the European Council.
The President of the Council would in effect become the President of Europe, Europe's main representative vis-à-vis the outside world. The emergence of such a strong role in the Council would inevitably weaken the role of the Commission as the balance of power would shift to the Council.
Although the Commission would in theory retain its existing powers, in practice its influence would change. There is also a real danger of rivalry and conflict between the President of the Council and the President of the Commission. They might, as has happened in the French fifth republic, have different party allegiances, which would make it very difficult for them to work in harmony.
Even if they have the same party affiliations, their institutional interest might lead to continuous turf battles. Giving Europe two heads is not the answer to the challenge of executive power. Reining in the Commission is not in the interests of small states.
Dr Brigid Laffan is Jean Monnet professor
of European politics and director, Dublin University Institute, University College Dublin.
Anthony Coughlan
France's President Charles de Gaulle once referred to the Brussels Commission as "an areopagus of technocrats without a country responsible to nobody".
An apt description of the most powerful group of non-elected persons in the world. For the 20 EU Commissioners contravene the principle of the separation of powers that is the basis of democracy by combining in one the executive, judicial and legislative arms of government.
As an executive they run the EU bureaucracy and manage its €100 billion budget. As a de facto court they impose fines for breaches of EU law. As a legislature they have a virtual monopoly in proposing EU directives and regulations, and continually churn out draft laws for the Council of Ministers to vote on.
Like all bureaucracies the Commission has a vested interest in expanding its own powers. Hand in glove with the supranational EU Court and European Parliament, it does everything it can to take powers from Europe's nation states, where laws are made by democratically elected national parliaments, and shift them to the Brussels level, where the unelected 20 propose the laws.
Each new EU Treaty, by reducing national competences, increases the Commission's power further. Ludicrously, it has proposed to Giscard's Convention that an EU Constitution should give it a central role in EU foreign policy!
Small wonder the Commission interferes outrageously in the ratification of treaties, even though this is in breach of European law. It used EU funds on the Yes side in Malta's recent accession referendum. It plans similar interventions in the other applicant country referendums. In Ireland's 1998 referendum on the Amsterdam Treaty it took the threat of injunctive legal action, initiated by this writer, to prevent the Commission using EU taxpayers' money to flood the country with Yes-side propaganda.
In some mysterious unexplained - and inexplicable - way the 20 Commissioners are supposed to represent the EU "common interest" in their actions and proposals. The Commission has a massive information budget to finance propaganda campaigns, pay for countless Brussels junkets and endow ideologues at national level to seek to persuade people of its disinterestedness.
The Nice Treaty's substitution of majority Council vote for unanimity in the appointment of national Commissioners and the Commission President, should in future make the Commission much more obviously the creature of the big EU states. That will help dissipate such illusions.
The Commission bureaucracy is notorious for incompetence and corruption. The Santer Commission had to resign en masse for these reasons in 1999. The EU Court of Auditors has certified only five per cent of the Commission's spending for 2001 as legal and regular. Last week the Financial Times reported the Commission's chief audit officer, Jules Muis, as lambasting its accounting control systems as "rudimentary". Another row over the Commission's finances is currently brewing.
Two ways of reining in this undemocratic institutional monster have been proposed by the minority of EU-critical members in Giscard's Convention.
One is to repatriate powers from the supranational level to the national. The other is to make Commissioners into genuine national representatives, elected by and reporting to national parliaments.
Both would be improvements from the democratic point of view.
Anthony Coughlan is senior lecturer Emeritus in social policy at Trinity College Dublin and secretary of the National Platform research and information group.