MAKING THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION STRONGER AND MORE EFFECTIVE

The Centre for European Reform proposes the following for making the European Commission stronger and more effective: " The EU cannot function well without a strong and independent European Commission. It needs the Commission to promote the single market, ensure that everybody follows the rules, protect the interests of small member-states against large ones, and think long-term about the broader European interest. As the euro crisis has continued, the Commission has gained greater technical powers to supervise eurozone economies. At the same time, however, its standing and moral authority vis-à-vis the member-states have declined. Twenty years ago, many people looked to the Commission to set the EU’s agenda and take the lead in managing crises. They do not expect the Commission to play those roles today. A lot of national politicians and businesses complain that the Commission is hyperactive in proposing too many detailed EU laws, that it responds too slowly to pressing problems, that it is insufficiently focused on essential issues and that it is too close to the European Parliament. Some of these criticisms are unfair: national governments tend to whinge when the Commission does its job of policing the single market or seeking to extend it.

The European Parliament’s increasing sway over the Commission is unfortunate: MEPs, sometimes under the influence of particular NGOs, often prod the Commission to propose legislation. The Commission may be willing to go along with the idea – or have doubts but fear the consequences of saying no to MEPs. Ask key officials in national capitals why they have become more hostile to the Commission, and they often say “because it is too dependent on the Parliament”.

The Commission should not take all the blame for this situation. After the 2009 European elections the Commission and the Parliament struck a deal on future legislation and procedures which increased the clout of MEPs. The Council of Ministers spurned the opportunity to make this a tripartite arrangement; had it done so, it could have balanced the legislative activism of the Parliament and pulled the Commission closer to it.

There has always been some ambiguity over the Commission’s various and contradictory roles: it is a political body that initiates legislation and also brokers compromises among the member-states; a technical body that evaluates the performance of the member-states’ economies; a quasi-judicial authority that polices markets and enforces rules; and a negotiator of common policies on behalf of the member-states.

Since the outbreak of the euro crisis, this ambiguity has become more pronounced, because the Commission’s technical role has grown: it has taken on new powers to supervise national economic policies. So when the Commission pronounces, say, that France may be given two further years in which to meet the 3 per cent of GDP budget deficit rule, is that the result of objective technical analysis or a reflection of the shifting political climate in national capitals?

This ambiguity gives governments and others an excuse to criticise the Commission. And there is a risk that if it becomes too political – a tendency that greater proximity to the Parliament may encourage – the Commission’s ability to carry out its technical functions effectively may be compromised.

Many MEPs and most of the pan-European political parties hope to use the May 2014 European elections to make the Commission more directly responsible to the Parliament. The parties say that they will each designate a candidate for Commission president. After the elections they want the European Council to propose the candidate of the party with the most MEPs as president – and then the Parliament to invest him or her. And if the European Council proposed any other name, say many MEPs, they would reject that name. If this scheme worked, it would probably not do much for the legitimacy of the Commission, because the competing candidates are likely to be unknown to most voters. Furthermore, the scheme would foster the illusion that the Commission is an EU government, when in fact the trend of recent years has been for power to shift to member states; when voters notice that European elections cannot change the fundamentals of policy, they may become even more disenchanted with the EU.

A further difficulty with this method of choosing the president is that fewer strong candidates are likely to be interested. Any serving prime minister would be reticent: he or she would have to announce that they wanted to “go to Brussels”, which would weaken them at home; they would then have to resign and run for the office without being sure of the outcome. Former ministers and MEPs would be most likely to win the party nominations. It is not yet certain that all the political parties and the European Council will, in the end, play this game – there is some hostility in Berlin, for example. If they allowed the Parliament to have the last word on President José Manuel Barroso’s successor, the Commission could well become more beholden to the Parliament, and the leading party within it.

Another problem with the Commission is that there are not enough important jobs for the 28 commissioners to do. With so many people around the table, substantive discussions are almost impossible. The one-commissioner-per-country rule encourages both governments and those they appoint to the Commission to assume – in breach of the treaties – that the job of commissioners is to represent their homeland.

The large number of commissioners, plus the fact that few of them are heavyweight politicians, has encouraged Barroso to establish a centralised, top-down regime. He may not have had much choice, but the resulting system does not encourage debate, innovation or reform. The relative weakness of the Commission is a problem for the entire EU.

What can be done to strengthen this flagging but crucial institution?

The most important step requires not a treaty amendment or an institutional reform but simply an agreement among heads of government. The European Council should decide to reinforce the Commission’s independence by appointing stronger figures as commissioners, and above all by ensuring that a heavyweight politician takes on the presidency. That means that the European Council must reserve the right to choose the president though that person must evidently be acceptable to the European Parliament rather than allow the political parties to fix the presidency via the European elections. The quality of the people that governments appoint to the key EU jobs in 2014 will reveal how committed they are to reforms.

The member-states must mandate the new president and his or her team to maintain their independence from the European Parliament, and support them in their efforts to do so. After the next European elections, the Council of Ministers should join the new Commission and the new Parliament in drawing up a tripartite accord for the EU’s work programme.

The problem of too many commissioners needs to be tackled. In the short term, the next president should divide his or her commissioners into seniors who could become vice presidents and juniors. The commissioners would remain of equal legal status and would sometimes meet together as a college. But there could be an informal understanding that the senior ones should co-ordinate the work of the juniors in the areas for which they are responsible. The Centre for New Reform suggests the following senior jobs: foreign policy to be held by the High Representative, who is in charge of the External Action Service as well as commissioner); trade; single market; competition; energy; climate and environment; economy; budget (including farming and regional aid); and justice and home affairs. The senior commissioners should meet together regularly.

In the longer run, when the treaties are re-opened, the EU should cut the number of commissioners. Either the large countries should always have a commissioner and smaller countries would take it in turns; or the large countries should have a commissioner more often than the small ones. In the past, small countries have blocked such systems, insisting that if the number of commissioners is to fall, there should be an equal rotation (the Lisbon treaty specifies such a rotation but allows the European Council to disregard it, which it has chosen to do). They should think again, for the sake of a smaller and therefore more effective Commission. If the large countries made it very clear that commissioners from small countries- as long as they were suitably qualified- would be just as likely to get the best jobs as those from large ones, the smaller states might agree.

Other treaty amendments could make it easier for the member-states to curb the Commission’s tendency to legislate. Currently, the Commission is not obliged to withdraw a proposal unless the member states unanimously request it to do so. A new provision could require the Commission to withdraw a proposal if asked to do so by a qualified-majority of member-states. And Commission proposals could be limited by a ‘sunset clause’: if a proposal does not become law, say, within three years, it should become void.

A new treaty should also give the European Council the right to sack the Commission. The European Parliament has that power and by threatening to use it forced the resignation of the Santer Commission in 1999. If the treaties said that either body could sack the Commission, the equidistance between governments and MEPs would be reinforced.