Plus ça change

Two contradictory assertions have coloured discussions over recent years about the case for institutional reform in the European Union. The first holds that the EU would become vulnerable to gridlock after enlargement in one form or another, in particular after the recent enlargements to take in ten new member states in 2004 and 2007. The second holds on the basis of experiences from previous enlargements that business as usual is the more plausible scenario.

Proponents of institutional reform have often pleaded their case on the grounds that the decision to enlarge necessitates a thorough overhaul of the institutions. Those who are more sanguine about the impacts of enlargement are much more relaxed about the current discussion of institutional reform, and more inclined to the view that reform may indeed be desirable, but that it is not a prerequisite for further development of the EU and its policies.

We can now begin to see the picture of what has actually happened within the EU since May 2004, when ten new member states acceded.

Enlargement is not the only factor that affect the workings of the institutions. Since José-Manuel Barroso became President of the European Commission, there has been an explicit commitment to a ‘less is better’ philosophy and thus to reducing rather than expanding the legislative ambitions of the Union.

Broadly speaking, the picture which emerges from the evidence is one of ‘business as usual’, that is to say the Union has continued to operate much as before, with similar rates of activity and output to those in the Union of only 15 members. Despite the frustrations of some of those involved at the difficulty of getting agreement on one or other favoured proposal, in practice the current patterns resemble those of the pre-enlargement period.

Hard and fast data are not easy to come by. The EU institutions produce information relatively systematically on decisions reached, but the reporting of stalled decisions is patchy. It is much too early to be able to discern clear patterns as a consequence of the further enlargement of January 2007 to include Bulgaria and Romania. The information summarised here is thus a partial picture of the trends, drawn from both official sources and academic work in progress.

Output data

• There has been some reduction in the volume of legislation (definitive legislative acts) adopted. During 1999-2003 around 195 legislative acts had been adopted each year; around 230 were adopted in 2004 (with a surge in April 2004 just before the EU15 became the EU25); some 130 were adopted in 2005; and 153 in 2006. These data do not include non-legislative decisions, increasingly important in fields such as foreign policy and some aspects of justice and home affairs.

• In the context of the ‘less is better’ objective we can observe only a modest drop in the number of proposals for legislative acts made by the Commission: 491 in 2003, 526 in 2004, 411 in 2005 and 482 in 2006. In 2006 the Commission also tabled 324 communications and reports, ten green papers and two white papers. There were surges in the proportions of propositions in justice and home affairs, and in energy and transport, reflecting evolving policy priorities.

• There has been a reduction in the time lag between proposal and decision on both those legislative acts subject to the unanimity rule and those based on qualified majority voting (QMV) based decisions. This is so for decisions under both the co-decision and the consultation procedures with the European Parliament (EP). Interestingly a larger proportion of decisions under the codecision procedure have been reached at first reading: 34 per cent in 2003, 45 per cent in 2004, 64 per cent in 2005 and 59 per cent in 2006.

• The length of legislative documents has increased, a development which may reflect the importance of paying attention to the specific needs and concerns of a larger and more diverse Union.

• As for what happens after decisions have been taken, the member states that joined in 2004 have an astonishingly good record in transposing decisions into national law, comparable to the average performance of the old member states and mostly closer to the leaders than to the laggards in the EU15. Similarly the new member states were subject to fewer infringement procedures than the average among the EU15, and seemed to be rather speedy in resolving compliance problems. The Czech Republic seems to be the only outlier and then only marginally so.

Commission

• There are evident differences in style between the Prodi Commission and the Barroso Commission, in particular the commitment of Barroso to the ‘less is better’ objective. The identification of individual commissioners with their own countries of origin is reported to have become stronger.

• President Barroso has introduced ‘working groups’ of Commissioners as a way of managing business by broad policy areas in the enlarged college. It is reported that a greater proportion than previously of ‘college’ decisions are in effect being reached through these working groups rather than in full college plenary sessions.

• The recruitment of staff from new member states is progressing, although it is taking some time to reach the target numbers. By the end of 2005 seven per cent of staff in the Commission came from new member states, and by July 2007 the figure was 12 per cent.

It is easier to recruit to the junior than to senior grades, since this follows standard procedures and is less dependent on identifying individuals with very specific experience and expertise, as well as appropriate language competences. The Commission has a particularly strong need for talented officials from the new member states, given the Commission’s role in developing and supervising policies that meet the needs of the new members.

• There is an even stronger predominance than before of English as the primary working language, which had already been boosted by the 1995 enlargement.

In 2006 the Commission reported that (of the one and a half million pages handled by its translation services) 72 per cent came from English as the source language, 14 per cent from French, 2.7 per cent from German and 10.8 per cent from other official languages. In practice it has proved difficult to recruit enough translators and interpreters to provide the language support which the EU institutions need.

Council

• Voting statistics are available only on decisions adopted by the Council, no data is collated on failed or blocked decisions, and explicit voting is recorded on only around 20 per cent of decisions subject to majority voting. Indeed the long-established norm of reaching most decisions by consensus-building seems to persist after enlargement.

Among the old member states the most frequent no-sayers or abstainers since enlargement have been in particular Denmark, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the UK, much the same as the previous pattern.

Among the new member states those more often contesting were Poland and the Czech Republic, also Lithuania (especially in 2005) and Slovenia (especially in 2006). But in all cases the contestation is often very subject specific.

• Those dossiers which are agreed by explicit voting get processed by Council slightly more quickly than before (524 days between January 2003 and April 2004, and 344 days between May 2004 and December 2006). Surprisingly this seems to hold good also for ‘more important’ issues, where there has been only a small increase in time taken to reach agreement. Issues subject to co-decision now get agreed more often at first reading.

• Issues also seem to be resolved with less frequent recourse to full ministerial discussions. Senior official committees of the Council seem to have made a successful investment in expediting business, although there are some differences among sectors: environmental decisions are slower, and agricultural decisions are quicker.

• It is hard to identify systematic coalition patterns from the explicit voting data. However, there is no evidence of a strong cleavage between old and new member states, but rather evidence of subject-specific cleavages and coalitions as in the EU prior to enlargement. Broadly the patterns are much the same pre- and post-enlargement.

European Parliament

• The European Parliament (EP) has not gridlocked either in terms of its working methods or its output. Party groups have become even more important in organising the work of the EP, with reduced opportunities for individual MEPs to stand out on particular issues. The European Peoples’ Party has been somewhat strengthened also by new arrivals The Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe continues to play a ‘pivotal’ role in determining the outcome on contested issues.

• Enlargement has perhaps made the European Parliament less ‘federalist’ in its composition with the arrival of MEPs from new member states. There are some indications that MEPs from new member states may be more ‘nationalist’ in orientation than those from most of the old member states.

• The reduction in the volume of new legislative proposals and the new emphasis on ‘better regulation’ create a challenge for the European Parliament in pressing for adjustments for MEPs to work in different ways and on a variety of issues, thus more about monitoring the existing stock of EU legislation than about developing new legislation

European Court of Justice

• Cases from new member states will take some time to feed into the litigation before the European Cout of Justice (ECJ) or Court of First Instance (CFI) and 2005/2006 evidence is thus not very revealing.

• The change in the composition of the ECJ seems not much to have altered its working methods. Efforts are being made to shorten the time taken to reach the conclusion of cases and there has been a slight increase in the numbers of cases closed and a reduction in the number of pending cases.

• The subject matter of cases over the most recent period shows an increasing emphasis on taxation, environment and market harmonisation. This was already a trend in period immediately before enlargement.

Conclusion

Overall then the evidence confirms that the EU institutions have been proceeding very much as usual since May 2004. As in the case of previous enlargements, the underlying patterns have survived the impact of new arrivals rather robustly given the scale of this enlargement and given just how much the new member states have themselves had to do to adjust to accession. They had, of course, been through particularly tough training and disciplines in the pre-accession period.

Helen Wallace is with Fiona Hayes-Renshaw co-author of The Council of Ministers (Palgrave 2006).The material covered in this article also draws on work by other colleagues, in particular: R. Dehousse, F. Deloche-Gaudet and O. Duhamel (Sciences Pos, Paris); E. Best and P. Settembri (EIPA, Maastricht), S.Hagemann and J. De Clercq-Sachsse (study published by CEPS, Brussels) and U. Sedelmeier (LSE).