The silent coup: the European Commission’s power grab

My latest report is out

I’m delighted to announce that my latest MCC Brussels report has just been published: The silent coup: the European Commission’s power grab.

I will be presenting the report this evening in Brussels (the event will be livestreamed).

Here’s a summary of the paper’s main points:

• The past 15 years have seen an accelerating expansion of the powers
  of the European Commission (EC), resulting in a major transfer
  of sovereignty from the national to the supranational level. This game-changing power shift has been managed through a surreptitious process of “competence creep”, outside the arena of democratic debate. I characterise this as the EU’s silent coup.

• From its inception in the 1950s, the EC was created as a supranational European institution and the least subject to democratic accountability. These problems have intensified as the EC has developed from a technical body into a fully-fledged political actor, occupying centre stage in the EU.

• EU politics have undergone a process of supranationalisation and “Commissionisation”, as the Commission has increased its influence over areas of competence that have previously been considered the preserve of national governments — from financial budgets and health policy to foreign affairs and defence.

• In recent years, the EC has used its responses to a series of crises — the euro crisis, Brexit, the Covid-19 pandemic, the Ukraine war — to assume more authority and make “emergency’ decisions”, for example on vaccines or sanctions, that lead to permanent changes in the exercise of EU power.

• The Commission may not always hold the whip hand. The EU’s labyrinthine power structure involves supranational bodies (the EC, European Central Bank and European Court of Justice), quasi-federal bodies (the European Parliament), and intergovernmental bodies (the European Council and the Council of Ministers), on top of member states. It can be hard to see who’s in charge. But one thing we know for sure is that all these components of EU power work together to ensure that Europe’s citizens are not the ones in control.

• Nor is this simply a problem of national versus supranational sovereignty (although it is that too). Recent history shows how national political elites can can collude with Brussels against their populist opponents in Europe — notably Hungary — and even against their own electorates at home.

• The biggest losers in the shift of power towards the unaccountable EC are the demos, the peoples of Europe. We urgently need reforms to make the EU more democratic, by returning powers to nation states, and to make the EC less powerful and more accountable.

• So what can we do about this? Barring extreme solutions, such as withdrawing from the EU/euro, the current trajectory of the European Commission suggests an urgent need to return powers to nation-states, and to make the EC less powerful and more accountable.

And here’s the introduction:

When the results of the recent European elections came in, many hoped that the surge in support for “right-populist” eurosceptic parties would, at the very least, signal an end to the reign of Ursula von der Leyen, whose term as president of the European Commission had been marked by controversy and low popularity, among EU citizens and officials alike — for her top-down, centralising approach, her disregard for official EU protocols, and her embrace of highly contentious policies, particularly in the context of the European Green Deal.

Instead, in a curious twist of fate, the “right-wing threat” is precisely what gave von der Leyen’s re-election bid the impetus that it otherwise lacked. By presenting herself as bulwark against “demagogues and extremists”, she was able to draw support from mainstream and pro-EU governments and MEPs, who, despite their misgiving about von der Leyen and her track record, saw little choice but to crown her once again with the all-too-clear aim of deploying the Commission’s supranational powers against their own “populist” adversaries — first and foremost Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán — and even against their own electorates.

This is not the first time the Commission, and especially von der Leyen, has skilfully exploited a crisis, real, perceived or portrayed as such by the dominant forces in the EU — in this case the “right-wing threat” — to enhance its power and influence across the European Union, often in alliance with pro-EU forces at the national level.

Indeed, if there is a common thread connecting the various crises that have rocked Europe over the past decade and a half — the sovereign debt crisis, the refugee crisis, the Brexit vote, the Covid-19 pandemic, the Ukraine war, etc. — it is the fact that each crisis has invariably led to a growing supranationalisation and “Commissionisation” of the EU’s decision-making process, whereby the Commission has expanded the scope its executive action in virtually every field, including many that previously were the exclusive preserve of EU member states and over which the Commission has no formal competence, from fiscal and monetary policy to public health, from foreign policy to defence and security matters. And under von der Leyen, these powers have expanded to an unprecedented degree, leading to an almost “US-presidential style understanding of executive power”, as Politico wrote, and garnering von der Leyen the nickname of “Queen Ursula” in Brussels.

Notably, this game-changing transfer of sovereignty from the national to the supranational level, at the expense of democratic control and accountability, has mostly occurred surreptitiously, through various forms of “competence creep”, in the absence of formal treaty changes, and outside of the realm of democratic debate. This has led scholars to describe the ever-deepening process of European process of supranational integration as one of “integration by stealth” or “covert integration”, meaning “a process that takes place outside the formal European political decision-making arena”, leading to a “competence accrual through covert policy-entrepreneurship by the European Commission” — or what has even been referred to as a “competence coup”. Indeed, the political philosopher Perry Anderson went as far as describing “the coup” — i.e., “an action taken suddenly, by stealth, catching its victims unawares, and confronting them with a fait accompli that cannot be reversed” — as “the ultimate secret of the construction of Europe, the key to understanding its success”.

This paper explores the key historical turning points through which this process has taken place, detailing the transition of the Commission from technical body to full-blooded political actor. It explores how the various crises of the past fifteen years have accelerated this process, with a particular focus on the first presidential terms of von der Leyen and the way she used the Covid-19 and Ukraine crises to enact a creeping transfer of competences from the national to the supranational level through a series of “silent coups”. It further investigates the shift in power dynamics between the Commission and the European Council, and the paradox of how this process has often been promoted by member states themselves, at the expense of their sovereignty. Finally, it raises concerns about the erosion of national sovereignty and democratic accountability that this process has entailed.

Read the full paper here.

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Thomas Fazi

Website: thomasfazi.net

Twitter: @battleforeurope 

Latest book: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (co-authored with Toby Green)