Nationalism in International Organizations: The Case of the European Commission

• In Event: New Frontiers in the Study of International Organizations

Abstract

Critics of international integration argue that it fundamentally undermines democracy, partly because policymakers in international institutions pursue an internationalist agenda, while the vast majority of citizens are firmly grounded in national contexts. This paper develops and tests new arguments that relate to this critique, by examining the role of internationalism, nationalism and partisanship in the leadership of the European Commission.

The Commission plays a key role in the European Union (EU), which is the furthest reaching form of international cooperation that presently exists. The Commission is the EU’s bureaucracy and also has significant executive functions, notably the ability to introduce legislative proposals, which are then considered by the EU member states in the Council and by the directly elected European Parliament. The Commission is led by the College of Commissioners, one from each member state, and each Commissioner is responsible for a different policy portfolio. The Commission is a hard test of the proposition that national interests matter in international organizations. The conventional and treaty-enshrined view of the Commission is that it is above the fray of national politics, and that Commissioners only have allegiance to international pan-European interests. However, previous research indicates that the Commission is in many ways imbued with national interests.

This study develops and tests a novel proposition on the conditions under which the national affiliations of Commissioners affect the contents of the Commission’s legislative proposals within their policy portfolios. We posit that congruence in partisanship between the responsible Commissioners and the relevant national ministers is a key mediating variable, which determines whether the Commissioners pursue their national interests. Furthermore, we argue that the presence of populist parties in national governments weakens the relationship between Commissioners and their national governments, because Commissioners are not selected from such parties.

The analysis examines an established and recently updated dataset (Decision-making in the European Union: DEUIII). The dataset includes detailed information on the policy positions of the European Commission and of each of the European Union member states’ national governments. It covers over 350 controversial legislative issues from a wide range of policy areas from the period 1999-2019. The information was assembled through hundreds of semi-structured interviews with key informants. The quantitative analyses focus on the conditions under which the content of the Commission’s policy proposals match the policy positions of the home member state of the responsible Commissioner. In addition, specific cases are selected and described to illustrate the theoretical arguments.

Author

• Robert Thomson, Monash University