Bauer, W. M. & Becker, S. (2014) “The European Commission’s stronger role in economic governance has made it an unexpected ‘winner’ from the Eurozone crisis“, LSE EUROPP, 02 Δεκεμβρίου.
Several commentators have argued that the Eurozone crisis has resulted in more intergovernmental EU decision-making, with the European Commission in particular being weakened by the role taken on by the European Council in the area of economic governance. Michael W. Bauer and Stefan Becker write, however, that while the Commission’s agenda setting powers have been curtailed, it has been considerably strengthened in managerial terms. They argue that far from being weakened, the Commission has emerged as an unexpected institutional ‘winner’ from the recent transformations of economic governance in the EU.
It has repeatedly been argued that the latest financial and economic crisis has shifted authority in EU economic governance even further to intergovernmental institutions. National governments in the European Council take the most prominent role in setting the economic agenda, and cooperation increasingly takes place in intergovernmental form outside the European treaties, as evidenced by the European Stability Mechanism and the Fiscal Compact. It has been concluded that this shift has taken place at the expense of other institutions and, in particular, the European Commission. This reading is in line with more general portrayals of the Commission as an institution in decline, or at least forced onto the political defensive.
We argue that this is an overly-simplified conclusion. The thesis of Commission decline provides only a partial account of economic governance during and after the latest financial and economic crisis. While one can indeed argue that the Commission’s agenda-setting powers have been curtailed, the Commission has at the same time been considerably strengthened in managerial terms. Several reforms in the areas of financial stability support, economic policy surveillance and the coordination of national policies have consolidated and sometimes even expanded the Commission’s mandate of supervising national compliance with EU rules; and intergovernmental form often has strong supranational substance.
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