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Multinational staffing and organizational functioning in the Commission of the European Communities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2009

Hans J. Michelmann
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Abstract

Staffing the Commission civil service with nationals from all nine European Community member states is necessary for pragmatic and political reasons, but multinational staffing also creates serious problems for the organization. Requirements for nationality balance in the Commission civil service have negative repercussions for personnel policy as well as the civil servants' career prospects and morale; nationality-based informal organization often interferes with organizational performance; multinational staffing results in a multilingual civil service and thus creates language and communication problems; the interaction of persons from nine member states creates a potential for nationality-related friction; and civil servants may have divided loyalties to the Commission on the one hand and to their member states on the other. National representation in the ranks is taken most seriously in those Commission units that have important policy concerns. Hence expanding the Commission's powers will increase the saliency of the nationality issue in that organization.

Type
Articles
Information
International Organization , Volume 32 , Issue 2 , Spring 1978 , pp. 477 - 496
Copyright
Copyright © The IO Foundation 1978

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References

1 Ranshofen-Wertheimer, Egon Ferdinand, The International Secretariat (Washington: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1945)Google Scholar.

2 Langrod, Georges, The International Civil Service (Leyden: A. W. Sythoff, 1963)Google Scholar.

3 There are three European Communities: the European Coal and Steel Community, the European Economic Community and the European Atomic Energy Community. Since the merger of the Communities' executive institutions in 1967, it has been customary to refer to them collectively as the European Community (EC). This paper is restricted to a discussion of Commission civil servants in Brussels and Luxemburg, and, unless otherwise noted, to the highest, and for our purposes most consequential, career category of officials, the A category. It is based on numerous interviews with Commission officials and two 1974 Commission-sponsored surveys of the organization's civil servants.

4 A number of authors have called for more studies in this area. See, for example, Hocking, Brian, “International Administration and the Commission of the E.E.C.,” Public Administration (Australia), Vol. 33 (12 1974): 318Google Scholar.

5 The relevant UN regulation is Article 101, paragraph 3 of the Charter of the United Nations. That for the Commission, is Article 27 of the organization's Staff Regulations.

6 Belgium has been overrepresented in the Commission since 1958. In part this is due to the fact that the Benelux quota was previously considered one unit, in part because of the ease of recruiting Belgians, especially for temporary positions which over the years became permanent.

7 Germany's interest in Community restriction of practices undermining free trade can be explained in terms of German industry's desire for accessible markets, while the French preoccupation with development aid is a result of the fact that at one time the single largest bloc of underdeveloped countries receiving Community aid was composed of former French colonies whose economies remained closely tied to that of France.

8 Thus, for example, a deputy director generalship had to be created for Italy in Directorate General VI (Agriculture), and for Holland in Directorate General VII (Transport).

9 This practice is referred to as specialized departmentalization in the organization theory literature.

10 An excellent discussion of French ministerial cabinets is found in Suleiman, Ezra N., Politics, Power and Bureaucracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), pp. 181–200Google Scholar.

11 The most notable exception to homogeneity in cabinet nationality occurs in the cabinet of the Commission president, which usually includes one or more members not from the president's member state because of that office's wider representational concerns. In addition, former commissioner Spinelli included a non-Italian in his staff as a matter of principle, and cabinets of commissioners from new member states, for the first few years after 1973, contained noncompatriots since officials with Commission experience were needed.

12 During a one hour interview with a junior cabinet officer, the conversation was interrupted on four occasions by telephone calls from the cabinet's member state. Two calls dealt with a current agricultural crisis in the Community; one requested information about the competent commissioner's attitude and likely course of action, the other combined an inquiry about the possibility of a Council meeting on the subject with a suggestion for action by the cabinet. The remaining two calls were made by private groups, and concerned matters before the Commission of direct concern to the calling parties.

13 On this issue see Taylor, Paul, “The Politics of the European Communities: The Confederal Phase,” World Politics Vol. 27 (04 1975): 336–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 One former cabinet officer recounted being in charge of keeping watch over the nationality balance for his cabinet. His duties included keeping track of every position and its nationality, and alerting his superiors of any developments affecting the contingent of his member state. The resulting maneuvers, particularly when they affected senior positions, often involved the commissioner himself.

15 See for example Holtz, Theodor, “Die Europaeischen Behoerden und die Nationalen Buerokratien, Probleme der Zusammenarbeit und der Personalstruktur” in Deutsche Gesellschaft fuer Auswaertige Politik, E. V., Regionale Verflechtung der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Munich and Vienna: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1973) pp. 213–29Google Scholar.

16 Officials pointed out that there is no disgrace in never attaining head of division rank in the Commission, since the political and national component in promotion decisions at the organizational level is so crucial, and since this fact is known to everyone. They suggested that some officials simply did not try to, (or did not have the political resources to) wage the necessary campaign to obtain the promotion, and many respected such a choice or dilemma.

17 Krenzler, H. G., “Die Rolle der Kabinette in der Kommission der Europaeischen Gemeinschaften,” Commission of the European Communities, 1974 (Mimeograph)Google Scholar.

18 On this and related issues see Rogalla, Dieter, “Das Dienstrecht der Europaeischen Gemeinschaften,” in Kaiser, Joseph et al. , eds. Recht und System des oeffentlichen Dienstes, (Baden Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 1973), pp. 305–66Google Scholar.

19 Political party and other considerations play a strong role in the selection of incumbents to high ranking posts. It is necessary, for example, to balance Belgain appointments between Flemings and Walloons, and within these groupings among members of various political parties. Similarly, the formation of the SPD-FDP government in Bonn in 1969 resulted in the subsequent appointment of a large number of senior German officials of “red coloration.”

20 “Cold Comfort Committee,” The Economist, 13 November, 1976, p. 67.

21 Respondents cited a number of examples of compatriots in the same directorate general engaging in back-biting, withholding information from each other, and indulging in other hostile behavior to illustrate this point.

22 Some officials in this predicament admitted that only the relatively generous salary of a Commission civil servant served to offset the absence of promotion prospects, and that leaving the Commission civil service was difficult because of the absence of reasonable opportunities in national administrations or in private employment.

23 The A category is divided into 8 grades, beginning at A1 (director general) and extending through A2 (director), A3 (head of division), A4–A5 (principal administrator) and A6–A7 (administrator). There are very few A8 officials.

24 Determining that there are no differences between pairs composed of compatriots and noncompatriots in the extent to which contacts are considered adequate does not, of course, mean that the relationship between any two nationalities may not be significantly worse than is the case for the remaining 71 noncompatriot pairs. For this reason an exhaustive series of chi-square analyses of the relationship between each of the possible 72 sets of noncompatriot pairs (it will be recalled that nine nationalities are represented in the Commission) for each level of superiors was run, each time comparing the extent of interaction between noncompatriots with the extent of interaction between the respondents and their compatriot superiors. Thus, for example, the interaction between German respondents and their non-German superiors was compared to the interaction between German respondents and German superiors in a chi-square analysis in which the other dimension was, as in Table 3, the extent (adequate or inadequate) of interaction. In no case was there a significant difference between the two sets of pairs, and therefore we can conclude that no significant interaction difficulties between any two nationalities exists.

25 A sufficient number of responses were not available for chi-square analyses of interactions between pairs of nationalities as were undertaken for the lower ranking respondents (see footnote 24); however inspection of a matrix containing the results for the existing pairs did not reveal obvious interaction difficulties between any noncompatriot pairs. Again we can conclude that nationality appears not to play a significant role in the interactions among civil servants from different Community member states.