On the nature of the Commission and of Europe

This week's Economist column on Europe addressed the contradiction that lies within the European Commission. It convincingly tells of an institution that is not sure what it is trying to be. Part technocratic civil service, part political government, the Commission is all things and none and so truly satisfies no one. The Commission is therefore instructed to work out what it actually wants to be and to develop that in a way that is truly convincing. 

It's a compelling piece, but if I'm writing a response it's because I believe it looks at the problem in somewhat the wrong way. Rather than focussing on the Commission in particular and trying to apply the framework of nation-state institutions, we need to step back and look at the EU as a whole.

The typical history of the EU will tell you that after the Second World War, the European Coal and Steel Community was founded in 1951, the first step on the road to creating a European community which would steadily expand in policy areas and membership and transform into the EU we know today. 

The reality is not nearly so straightforward. In fact there was a burst of different organisations and institutions, all trying to form the Europe of tomorrow in some form or another. They all broadly focused on the idea of greater cooperation and unity between the states of Europe, but how deep this new union should be varied greatly. The Council of Europe (founded 1949) was initially going to be the basis for a new European state, yet ended up as a more traditional international organisation. The Coal and Steel Comunity did manage to get more integration and to move some policy-making up to shared institutions, though at the time its membership was very limited - just 6 countries. When the ambitions of the European Defence Community failed, a larger group of states came together to form the Western European Union in 1954, a looser military alliance designed to support NATO. And then, in response to the successes of the European Economic Community (an evolution of the Coal and Steel Community), some other states who wanted a looser trading arrangement formed the European Free Trade Area in 1960. Overlying all of this meanwhile was NATO and the transatlantic alliance on one side and the various European states occupied by the Soviet Union on the other.

So, a couple decades after the war, Europe has a messy patchwork of 'unifying' institutions, covering different geographic areas, different policy remits and different levels of integration. Each institution has its own story but broadly speaking they reveal a deep debate between federalists and intergovernmentalists. The federalists wanted European unity to mean building a new state, starting small if necessary and then expanding to cover all European countries who wanted to take part. The intergovernmentalists wanted simple international organisations, where countries could occasionally gather to reaffirm their friendship and perhaps sign up to high-level objectives. Sometimes this debate played out inside of new institutions but, in the free-flowing context of post-war reconstruction, it also manifested as entirely separate and competing organisations. 

In the years since we've seen a kind of survival of the fittest. Some of the organisations have been largely abandoned. Some now form part of the furniture of Europe but with a limited day-to-day impact. Others are vital forums for policy-making. Steadily most of the competing institutions have merged together, joining up with the one that showed the most dynamism and success: the EU. The EU itself had to go through a merger process, turning the various 'communities' into a single Union and collapsing several decades worth of international negotiations into just two treaties that would define how the Union functioned and its powers.

But the debate between federalists and intergovernmentalists has never really been solved. To the extent that the two sides agree on much, they agree that the core of the debate plays out within the EU, as the most important institution defining the future of Europe. 

And so the EU ends up as a constant product of this debate. It can look like an international organisation, with talk of a secretariat-general or international summits. But it can also seem like a state, with binding laws and a Parliament to legislate. The contradictions that the Economist piece described are therefore not particular to the Commission but an inherent part of the EU and of all European-level politics. If anything, it is perhaps more surprising that it took so long for these contradictions to bleed out into the Commission, which has only recently moved from being strictly technocratic. 

So if we want to understand what the Commission is, we can't look at it in isolation, we have to look at the EU as a whole. In textbooks, you'll often find the EU described as a 'sui generis' organisation, meaning that it is totally unique. The trouble with unique organisations is that they are, by definition, hard to compare. And so if we accept the idea that the EU is sui generis, then by extension we must avoid the temptation to try and layer it with the language of a state. The Commission does not look like a civil service or a government because the EU itself is not a state. And while comparisons are useful for helping people understand something unfamiliar, the public already has strong ideas about what state institutions do and look like. If we use comparisons we know are not fair then it only confuses the matter further. 

Instead, it is easier to tackle the contradictions inside the EU head-on rather than to explain them away as mistakes. The Commission has a mixture of functions because this is the deliberate compromise that has built up over time. A compromise between different schools of thought that extends through governments, political parties and citizens at large. The growing politicisation of the Commission has been the victory of federalists (even if the issue was ironically pushed by eurosceptics who felt the Commission was too powerful to be truly impartial anyway). But it has only been a partial victory, the national governments still have a large hold over the composition of the Commission and the Commission President is still a long way from having the kind of power over the direction of European politics that the European Council (the summits of EU leaders) has. 

So, accidentally a contradiction or deliberately a compromise? Perhaps the difference does not matter if the end result is the same. But nonetheless it does tell us something about who is responsible and how this contradiction/compromise could or should be changed. 

Rather than placing the blame at the feet of the Commission for trying to do too much, perhaps we should take a harder look at the role of citizens and national governments. In spite of the years of consolidation, debates and shifting powers, there's still a wide diversity of views around what we actually want Europe to look like and what we want the EU to be. The Commission is merely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Europe's confused relationship between its preferences for national sovereignty and its desire for greater unity, between its real powers and its apparent proto-statehood, between the intergovernmentalists and the federalists. Even if the Commission decided it really wanted to be a European government or really wanted to pull back into a civil service role, it's far from obvious that this choice is actually within the gift of officials in Brussels. It is citizens and governments who have made it this way so far and it is those same citizens and governments who will shape its future. 

It's far from neat or logical, but perhaps the problem is not that we don't get what we ask for but rather that we do? 

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