IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/erp/arenax/p0019.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Organising Institutional Autonomy in a Political Context: Enduring Tensions in the European Commission's Development

Author

Listed:
  • Morten Egeberg

Abstract

The High Authority, later the European Commission, was indeed an organisational innovation. Unlike international governmental organisations, it should from its very inception be able to act independently of national governments. Its autonomy was to be justified by its role as a promoter of the common interest of the community. However, having become a full-fledged political body, concerns about accountability are automatically raised. Obviously, territorialisation of the institution; i.e., e.g., making commissioners accountable to the governments that have nominated them, could be one possible route to legitimisation, however, this would run counter to the genuine mission of the institution. Alternative options might be sectorisation; i.e., e.g., to co-opt affected interest groups, or party politicisation, i.e. making commissioners politically accountable to the European Parliament. Both sectorisation and party politicisation threaten institutionalisation ("autonomisation") of the Commission, however, they both tend to displace territorialisation. Through an ongoing demarcation of the political and administrative parts, a continued institutionalisation (which already has come far) of the Commission services could be compatible with party-politicisation of the college of commissioners. The paper presents some fresh data on the way top officials are appointed.

Suggested Citation

  • Morten Egeberg, 2004. "Organising Institutional Autonomy in a Political Context: Enduring Tensions in the European Commission's Development," ARENA Working Papers 2, ARENA.
  • Handle: RePEc:erp:arenax:p0019
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.arena.uio.no/publications/working-papers2004/papers/04_02.xml
    File Function: Full text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Semin Suvarierol, 2009. "Networking in Brussels: Nationality over a Glass of Wine," Journal of Common Market Studies, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 47(2), pages 411-435, March.
    2. Semin Suvarierol, 2009. "Networking in Brussels: Nationality over a Glass of Wine," Journal of Common Market Studies, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 47, pages 411-435, March.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:erp:arenax:p0019. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sindre Eikrem Hervig (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.arena.uio.no/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.