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Some Preliminary Notes on Bureaucratic Relationships in the European Economic Community

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2009

Lawrence Scheinman
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Extract

In his review of the Fifth General Report on the Activity of the European Community the Rapporteur for the European Parliament critically singled out certain aspects of the Commission's style in developing Community policy: the excessive importance it seemed to place on proposing only solutions which had the strongest chance of being adopted by the Council of Ministers instead of maximizing the potentiality of its power of initiative; and, as a corollary, the disturbing tendency toward increasing infusion and influence of national administrations in the policy orientations and decisions of the European Economic Community (EEC).

Type
Articles
Information
International Organization , Volume 20 , Issue 4 , Fall 1966 , pp. 750 - 773
Copyright
Copyright © The IO Foundation 1966

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References

1 Agence Europe, October 16, 1963.

2 Agence Europe, January 18, 1966. This point, as drafted, was not acceptable to France's partners and was modified considerably in the agreement reached at Luxembourg at the end of the month. The text finally accepted stresses the importance of close collaboration between the Council and the Commision and provides that,

Before adopting a proposal of particular importance it is desirable that the Commission make the appropriate contacts with the Governments of the Member States, through the Permanent Representatives. This procedure, however, in no way impairs the right of initiative the Commission holds under the Treaty.

(Agence Europe, January 31, 1966. Emphasis supplied.) It is still unclear whether the Permanent Representatives are die sole medium or merely apprised of contacts which may occur at any of several levels.

3 Much of what follows is based on documentary and interview research in several Community sectors—competition (cartels and ententes, state aids, harmonization of legislation), the right of establishment, transport, and certain dimensions of commercial policy (development of the list of exceptions in the Kennedy Round of General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade [GATT] negotiations, development of a common commercial policy). The national administrations referred to are die French, West German, Dutch, Italian, and Belgian, which have been studied in roughly that order of priority.

4 Haas, Ernst B., Beyond the Nation-State: Functionalism and International Organization (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1964), p. 29Google Scholar.

5 On levels of decision making and styles of negotiation see Haas, Ernst B., “International Integration: The European and the Universal Process, ”International Organization, Summer 1961 (Vol. 15, No. 3), pp. 366–392CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Haas, Ernst B. and Schmitter, Philippe C., “Economics and Differential Patterns of Political Integration: Projections About Unity in Latin America, ”International Organization, Autumn 1964 (Vol. 18, No. 4), pp. 705–737CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 The application of such a scheme will be treated in a book now in progress, provisionally entitled Patterns of Power: Bureaucracy and the Integrative Process. The following discussion focuses more on the mechanistic definition of interpenetration than on the attitudinal one.

7 Right of establishment is governed by Title III, Chapter 2, of the Treaty Establishing the European Economic Community (Treaty of Rome) and refers to the free movement of non-wage-earners between themember states. These persons are to be allowed to establish themselves for business or commercial purposes in any member country on the same conditions as nationals of the state in question.

8 There are, at present, over 260 such groups which meet periodically in Brussels. More than one-third of these groups are clustered in two Directorates-General: Internal Market and Agriculture. About55 percent of these groups consist of governmental bureaucrats only. Of the remainder, approximately 25 percentare mixed groups of governmental and private experts. The balance (about 20 percent) consists of private experts exclusively.

9 In the first half of 1966 the French government refused to send administrative experts to Brussels to participate in working groups on three separate occasions. Two of these refusals pertained to the social field where, France insists, the Community lacks authority to act under the Rome Treaty except in a limited number of cases. The third refusal concerned the establishment of a working group to study the harmonization of penal law for the breach of Community regulations and directives.

Under any circumstances, however, manageability would appear to be a serious problem for the national governments. It is reported that in 1964, for example, close to 1,200 meetings of expert groups took place. These groups generally consist of medium- or high-level fonctionnaires, the delegations from each state varying from two to six members, so that includingCommission personnel the average meeting consists of some twenty to 25 persons.

10 Bureaucratic interpenetration in the cartel sector is relatively weak both in the conceptualization and executory stages. In the latter instance there is a Consultative Committee of national administrators. This committee was established under Regulation 17 (1962) to assist the Commission in the application of cartel provisions, but the Commission has sought to minimize its role by interpreting the provisions which govern it in a very restrictive fashion. The members of the committee, on the other hand, havesought to expand its role. For a partial justification of the low level of interpenetration in this field, see below, footnote 15.

11 Unlike the cartel sector in which information can be gleaned from investigations of cartels and from other members of the industrial community, in the state aids sector information often may be exclusively in the hands of the national administrations responsible for the management of these aids.

12 Article 83 o£ the Rome Treaty provides for a Transport Committee. This committee is composed<o£ independent experts designated by the governments of the member states, and among these experts are high-ranking civil servants from the ministries of transport. The Commission made poor use of thepotential of this committee and thus increased certain tensions which already existed between the Commission bureaucracy and the national administrations. For example, the Commission would often submit to this committee problems which presupposed a nonexistent common transport policy; but questions basic to a common policy itself were rarely discussed with this committee.

13 There is another side to this coin: the desire of the national administrations to institutionalize working groups which have been set up to prepare proposals by turning these groups into continuing consultative or surveillance committees. While a number of such committees already exist, their proliferation is not looked upon very favorably by the Council of Ministers (and especially France) largely because of the financial costs involved and also because of a concern over the deconcentration of authority.

14 The terms pragmatic and ideological are employed here in a methodological sense. I am not referring to the degree of commitment of Community administrators to their organization and its goals but rather to the procedural code by which they operate.

Community administrators also might be categorized according to whether they are activists who seek to integrate or nonactivist “pencil pushers” who passively fulfill their assigned tasks. Indeed, there is a problem of nonactivism in the Commission and it is due essentially to the minimal direction or instruction by the Commissioners to their administrative staffs. Lack ofdirection also accounts for the glaring problem of overlapping jurisdictions and competition among various Commission services. The term “legalist” could be substituted for ideologist without doing violence to the distinction in question.

15 It should be pointed out that under any circumstances the development of an effective dialogue on cartel problems in the Community would have been difficult. At the time the Rome Treaty went into effect Belgium, Italy, and Luxembourg lacked legislation on restrictive practices and even today Italy and Luxembourg still have not passed the necessary legislation. The absence of a body of law on the subject meant the absence of qualified individuals capable of intensively discussing cartel issues. On the other side, the Commission had to deal with the highly organized and influential West German Bundeskartelamt which sought to impose itscartel philosophy on the entire Community. Caught in this dilemma, even more pragmatic administrators might have sought to work in relative isolation rather than run the risk of becoming the prisoner of the West German cartel office or of losing valuable time in nugatory discussion. There does exist a Conference des Ententes which serves as a meeting ground for national and Community experts, but this organ has never been turned into a consensus-building body for cartel policy.

16 Lindberg, Leon N., The Political Dynamics of European Economic Integration (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1963)Google Scholar; and Lindberg, Leon N., “Decision Making and Integration in the European Community,” International Organization, Winter 1965 (Vol. 19, No. 1), pp. 56–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 It seems likely that progress in other fields will require a stimulus equal to that which France provided in agriculture, especially given the less “Communitarian” attitude which has been developing since France vetoed British entry into the EEC in 1963. It is open to question whether such a stimulus might not have to await the entry of new members, such as the United Kingdom, to the Community. Under conditions of extended membership, however, there arises the problem of the extent to which the Community style will remain the same.

18 There is a danger in overemphasizing information and the expert knowledge it brings in its wake. Where sensitive political and economic interests are involved, expertise alone is insufficient to carry major policy proposals. It may be argued that in overemphasizing expertise in the transport sector the Commission lost sight of certain important economic and political interests, a loss which eventually cost the Commission its leadership role.

We should also bear in mind that both national and Community administrators could use the information medium to achieve particular ends and thus distort the objective flow of information. This is, in fact, a not uncommon practice of national administrations when they first learn of Commission interest in a specific sector.

19 The planning sector would seem to be particularly amenable to such tactics. The Community policy context gives national administrators a means of escaping the influence of their clientele groups and of reshaping and reorienting national policies.

20 Problems of this nature tend to cluster in the harmonization field. A typical example may be found in the second projet de directivefor the harmonization of pharmaceutical legislation where the provisions for the selection of experts to pass judgment on the marketability of pharmaceutical products was sufficiently broad to accommodate the rather liberal West German and rather restrictive French systems. The result of so broad a provision was to gain the accord of all the national delegations but at the same time to leave the considerably different national systems in very much the same state that they were before the directive was drafted. In other words, harmonization was terminological only, not substantive.

21 One of the problems the EEC must cope with is the lack of a real administrative training ground. The College of Europe at Bruges, while a sometime source for Commission recruitment, does not fulfill this need. There is a long-standing debate on whether a fully independent career administration or a seconded(but independent) administration is best suited to the needs of the EEC, and there are compelling arguments on both sides. This subject will be treated at greater length in a forthcoming article “Bureaucratic Mobility as an Integrative Factor: The Case of the EEC.”

22 One aspect of bilateral relationships which is deserving of special note is the relationship of the Commissioners and their cabinets to the national governments. Both the Commissioners and their cabinets operate at the political level in the countries of which they are nationals (and elsewhere as well).Often, Commission jonctionnairesresort to the cabinets in order to seek a means to neutralize or eliminate national bureaucratic resistance. Conversely, the cabinets can and do keep an eye on what the Commission services are doing in terms of national interests. As in the case of the Commission bureaucracy, however, not all thecabinets function equally effectively or efficiently, nor are all used for the same purpose by the Commissioners in charge.

23 I am referring here to “external” restraints. However, we must not forget “internal” restraints which derive from the growth of the organization itself. There is a lack of cohesion within the EEC administration and a good deal of interservice rivalry. This rivalry not only impedes organizational efficiency but also reduces the ability of the Community bureaucracy to maintain autonomous leadership in policy initiation and development. The problem will be examined more fully in the article cited in footnote 21 above.

24 This is highly nuanced. French instructions, for example, might be cast in the sense of “don't go beyond this and that limit” with a margin of maneuver left within this framework. (This is much less evident since the termination of the recent crisis, however.) Italian instructions, on the other hand, often may be drafted with a view to insisting on one or several points with nothing whatever being said regarding any of the other points to be discussed. Consequently, the Italian delegate may be “free” on these other matters. In any case, the instructions which are given are occasionally challenged by the Permanent Representatives either because the instructions go too far or because they don't go far enough.

25 See, however, footnote 15 above.

26 The public contracts case, not yet decided by the Council of Ministers, also exemplifies some of the weaknesses of relying on administrative penetration to carry policy proposals. In this case the West German administration negotiated a compromise with the Commission only to be reversed at home by pressure applied by the länder and cities which pass most of the contracts and which felt inadequately consulted by Bonn. The Commission eventually redrafted certain provisions to accommodate Germany's federal situation. In fact, it does not appear that the Commission has come to grips either with the issue of West German or Community federalism.

27 This does not necessarily mean that the issue is treated at the political level. See, for example, the problem of “right of information” treated below.

28 I am referring principally to parliamentary controls. However, the influence of interest groups should not be underestimated.

29 A good example is the issue of association with third states. In the cases of Greece, Turkey, and, presently, Austria, the economic experts were much less favorable to reaching agreement than the political leaders. If purely economic criteria were used or if economic technicians dominated the negotiations there probably would not be association agreements with any of these countries.

30 In West Germany there is a balance between the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Economic Affairs insofar as the management of Common Market affairs is concerned. Despite this formula of shared responsibility there are always issues which lead to overlapping jurisdictions and consequent tensions.

31 One manifestation is the growth of councils of “technical” ministers such as agriculture, finance, and transport. Although the recent Community crisis retarded this growth, at least for France, the general trend has been in the direction of a sectorial allocation of responsibility. What then becomes crucial is the manner in which the national governments arrive at the positions they will take in the negotiations in Brussels.

32 While there may be poor interministerial coordination in Bonn this does not mean that within any one ministry things might not be run autocratically, with tight controls over the individual administrator. The problem basically is that a West German administrator may be speaking only for his ministry and notfor his government.

33 The French delegation is the most adamant on this point but Italy and the Netherlands follow close behind. The West German delegation takes a more permissive view of the situation but at the same time insists that it be kept informed of all such correspondence and interchange.

34 We must stress once again that the rule does not hold uniformly true. The Commission is not always the leader: National administrations sometimes seek to use the EEC as a means to achieve internal change, to gain greater influence over the external environment, or to assert greater authority in the national context.