Like it or not, the European Union enlargement machinery has rumbled into life once more, for geopolitical reasons that require no further explanation. The number of 36 member states, at an as yet undetermined point in the future, is often cited: the new entity would include the six Balkan states (Albania, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia) and three from the eastern zone (Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine). There is no guarantee that all these states will actually be accepted into the EU. Against this backdrop, is worth noting that Turkey still has candidate country status. And as History is littered with surprises, we cannot rule out the eventuality that Switzerland may do a U-turn and apply for candidate status, which could not be easily denied it.
The aim here is not to analyse the probabilities of each individual country joining. It is, meanwhile, a matter of good old-fashioned common sense that the EU needs to reform to become more efficient in a world that has changed. A lot has been said, for instance, about putting an end to the practice of unanimous decision-making in the Council of the EU in as many areas as possible and bolstering the powers of the European Parliament. As for the European Commission, the most recent ideas concern of improving its legitimacy, by means of the Spitzenkandidaten system, or the election of its President by universal suffrage, which was mooted in the framework of the Conference on the Future of Europe (proposal 38). Yet the Commission’s major problem is not so much its legitimacy as its size, which informs its functions on a day-to-day basis. This question is so complex that it is no longer even discussed. But there is no practicable way of preparing for the future without addressing the elephant in the room.
Since the first days of the Community, the High Authority of the European Coal and Steel Community and the executive of the EEC and the EAEC are supposed to be made up of competent, independent individuals of integrity, acting in the European general interest. This is still true to this day: European Commissioners, bound by their oaths before the Court of Justice, do not take up position in order to advance the interests of their home countries; at the very most, they may enlighten debates of the College by describing, where required, the situation in the ‘member state they are the most familiar with’.
But these individuals do not come from nowhere. They come from a country. And within these bodies, a geographical balance had to be struck, which is automatically a balance between populations at the same time. As with the composition of the Parliamentary assembly, the demographic criterion made its debut in the discussions of the Council, then at the level of the executive bodies. In the High Authority of the European Coal and Steel Community, made up of nine members, three came from each of the ‘small countries’ and six came from the ‘large countries”, with a maximum of two per nationality. The Italian population, for instance, was represented half by one of the Italian committee members and half by another. Frequently, the two committee members of the same nationality could come from very different political backgrounds. This standard was then rolled out to the composition of the Commission of the EEC. The Euratom treaty, signed by six countries, on the other hand, made provision for the Commission of this Community to be limited to 5 members: no Luxembourg national has ever sat on it. This was the sign that the ‘national representation’ requisite was not absolute and that the criterion of efficiency could take precedence over it in individual circumstances.
The total number of members of these three executive bodies comes to 23. A first and highly pertinent streamlining decision was to merge the executives, set out in the treaty and in force from 1967: this was the Commission of the European Communities, henceforth made up of 9 members. The number of Commissioners then remained the same until successive waves of enlargements, under the rationale described above: four more after the first enlargement (1973), one when Greece joined (1981), three more when Spain and Portugal came on board (1985), a further three in 1995 when Austria, Finland and Sweden joined, giving a total of 20 at that time.
In January 2000, preparations for the biggest wave of enlargement were underway. In a contribution to the forthcoming intergovernmental conference, the Commission floated the idea of one Commissioner per country, meaning that the ‘large’ countries would give up ‘their’ second Commissioner. They were agreeable to this, on the condition that the institution was reorganised and the College given a hierarchy; the criterion of efficiency thus won out over that of ‘national glory’.
During the French Presidency of the Council in the second half of 2000, Paris proposed limiting the number of members of the College to 20, but this idea was not taken up. The small countries insisted on retaining ‘their Commissioners’ (see EUROPE 7802/1). The Treaty of Nice came down in favour of the formula of a national from each member state, but left the door open for the number of Commissioners to be lower than the number of member states once the latter figure reached 27, with a ‘fair rotation’ to be defined unanimously by the Council. The ‘Prodi’ Commission, which took up office in 1999, was a team of 20, which became 30 on 1 May 2004, when the great enlargement took effect. It was not until the ‘Barroso I’ Commission, in November 2004, that the ‘large’ countries would lose their second Commissioners, leading to a College of 25, then of 27 upon the accession of Bulgaria and Romania (2007).
The question of the Commission’s size returned to the agenda during the preparations for the constitutional treaty. An initial version provided for a Commission of 15; it was rejected during the preparatory work. The compromise reached was as follows: the first Commission appointed under the ‘constitution’ would be made up of one national from each member state, but thereafter, the institution would be made up of a number of members equal to two thirds of the number of member states, unless the European Council unanimously decided otherwise. This would mean that in a European Union of 27, there would be just 18 Commissioners: a very considerable slimming down!
After the constitutional treaty rejected, the authors of the Treaty of Lisbon retained this mechanism, with effect from 1 November 2014, but clarified that the rotation must be fair and reflect the demographic and geographical balance of the entire Union.
In June 2008, the Irish rejected the new treaty in a referendum. According to an analysis of voter motivation, their concerns focused, amongst many other things, on the loss of ‘their’ Commissioner. In its conclusions of June 2009 (see EUROPE 9925/2, 9803/10), the Council decided that in the future, there would be the same number of Commissioners as member states as long as the treaty was ratified, which it was in the second Irish referendum in October. This paved the way, indefinitely, for ‘overweight’ Commissions, which reached its peak with 28 members, between Croatia joining the United Kingdom leaving.
It should be noted that at the time, a broad and solid consensus was reached on seriously tackling the size of the Commission, with the larger states taking their turn in the rotation on the same basis as the smaller ones. Whereas the former group made a particularly generous gesture, it was a single country (of 5 million inhabitants) from the latter group that challenged the system and caused it to be abandoned.
Under the Presidency of Emmanuel Macron, France revived calls for a scaled-down Commission (see EUROPE 12045/35). While the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, did not oppose this, she struggled to envisage a Commission without Germany – and we can see her point. Vagueness prevailed on the subject and still does today.
Although it is imperative to avoid a system of co-opting technocrats who have never been put before the electorate, it would be helpful if all the national governments and the general public of their countries understood the unique status enjoyed by the Commission, which is not their property. But as it is the representatives of the states who negotiate treaties, there can be no hope of progress without taking on board the way they think. To move the situation forward, the inter-state reflex should be managed, not banished, by developing an approach based on the imperative of demographic and geographical balance referred to above. (To be continued).
Renaud Denuit