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How Enlargement Affected the Functioning of the Committee of Permanent Representatives

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How Enlargement Affected the Functioning of the Committee of Permanent Representatives View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Research Papers in Economics European Political Economy Review ISSN 1742-5697 No. 6 (March 2007), pp. 31-52 www.eper.org “Coreper Enlarged”: how Enlargement Affected the Functioning of the Committee of Permanent Representatives Jakob Lempp* Abstract Before enlargement, many experts expected that the functioning of most EU institutions would be severely affected by the accession of the ten new member states in 2004. Compared to these expectations, effects that actually occurred were relatively moderate. Especially in the Committee of Permanent Representatives, enlargement took place smoothly and without major disturbances. However, some changes are noticeable. The paper analyses the way how enlargement influenced the functioning of Coreper. The analysis is based on 41 qualitative interviews with experts from the Council General Secretariat and from Permanent Representations from both ‘old’ and ‘new’ member states. Keywords: Council of Ministers, Coreper, Permanent Representations, enlargement, informality, committee governance * Jakob Lempp; Institute of Political Science; Dresden University of Technology. I am very grateful to Uwe Puetter, Thomas Christiansen, Janko Altenschmidt, Sunshine Moore and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. 32 European Political Economy Review 1. Introduction On 1 May 2004, eight central and eastern European countries, along with Malta and Cyprus, joined the European Union (EU). The biggest enlargement to date, the process of integrating the new member states challenged the functionality of the EU’s institutions. Large-scale changes were expected to occur within the different types of committees whose total number of representatives would increase by one third, especially within the Council of the EU and its preparatory bodies: the Committee of Permanent Representatives (Coreper) in its two manifestations, and the Council working groups. Several years before enlargement took place, it was feared that the candid atmosphere which has repeatedly been identified as the conditio sine qua non for the smooth running of the decision- making process, as well as the feeling of mutual responsibility and the commitment to a higher—European—goal would be lost through the enlargement and its subsequent greater cultural and linguistic diversity. Indeed, Jeffrey Lewis asked in 2002, ‘Will Coreper continue to function the same in an EU of twenty-seven or more? … Some believe [it] will lose its ability to synthesize the national and the European in such an unwieldy and heterogeneous grouping… Much will depend on how quickly and extensively new EU members become socialized to Coreper’s normative environment.’ (Lewis 2002: 295) Because of this belief, the existing structure of the Union was universally perceived to be incapable of integrating the ten—or twelve—eastern, central, and southern European candidate countries. Most scholars accepted the view, that the size of a group makes a difference and that ‘the smaller the circle of participants the better.‘1 Experts agreed that in order to facilitate the transition, fundamental reforms would need to be introduced. According to the German Foreign Affairs Minister at the time, Joschka Fischer, reform was necessary to create the institutional preconditions for enlargement (‘Frankfurter Rundschau’, 1 December 2000). International media also confirmed the perception that without 1 Puetter 2006: 24. See for Georg Simmels argument on groups size Simmel 1902 and Simmel 1908. Lempp: “Coreper enlarged” 33 changes in the voting weights of governments and the extent of majority voting, the decision-making machinery designed for the six founder members back in 1957 will collapse. Consequently, during the period prior to the Intergovernmental Conference in Nice in 2000, representatives from EU member and candidate countries, political scientists, and the public debate pointed to extensive and profound changes in the institutions, decision-making processes, and even some of the guiding principles of the EU as the prerequisites for enlargement. The result was the signing of the Treaty of Nice on 8 December 2000. Only days later, however, the perception arose that Nice had been a failure, and that the Union was not yet fit for enlargement. Indeed, the then-president of the European Commission, Romani Prodi, feared that enlargement based on the Treaty of Nice would result in more frequent blockades in the Council (‘Süddeutsche Zeitung’, 13 December 2000), and most commentators agreed that ‘rejoicing over securing enlargement … would be premature’ (‘Economist’, 11 December 2000). The final expectation was that the functioning of most EU institutions—but especially the Council—would be severely affected by the accession of the ten new member states in 2004. Despite the uncertainty of its ability to succeed, enlargement did proceed as outlined in the Treaty of Nice, and the EU has been functioning with 25 member states for more than two years now. Although there is a considerable amount of literature on the Council in general (Westlake 2004; Hayes-Renshaw/ Wallace 2006; Sherrington 2000; Lempp 2005; for the Council General Secretariat see Egger 1994) and on Coreper (Bostock 2002; Lewis 1998; De Zwaan 1995; Mentler 1996; Noel 1967), a comprehensive or theory-based study on the effects of enlargement on formal and informal processes in Coreper is still missing (for general studies on Treaty reform within the EU see the Special Issue of the Journal of European Public Policy 9 (1), 2002). Theoretic assumptions and hypotheses could be drawn from research on epistemic communities, on deliberative modes of decision-making within the Council structure (Risse 2000), and – in a broader sense – from sociological and historical institutionalism, or other approaches that emphasize 34 European Political Economy Review the possibility of the emergence of common loyalties,2 as well as from public policy analysis (Bennett/ Howlett 1992; Jenkins-Smith/ Sabatier 1993; also Puetter 2006: 23f). Without repeating the arguments of these theoretic approaches in detail a number of questions will be derived from them that will help to structure the following paper. The general and underlying question is: how did enlargement affect the functioning of Coreper? The purpose of this article is then to answer a set of related questions: How did the new member states prepare for entrance and how did the EU itself prepare for enlargement? Are there any recognizable differences between old member states and new member states? Have any new cleavages arisen? How do civil servants of old member states perceive the civil servants of new member states? Do the new civil servants feel well integrated into Coreper and the Council working groups? Has Coreper been able to preserve the esprit de corps for which it is known? Finally, the article intends to develop a provisional evaluation of the efficiency and the functional capability of the preparatory bodies of the Council of the EU with 25 members. The subsequent sections will review these issues in detail. The focus of the discussion lies on the perceptions of the representatives themselves. The conclusions of this article are drawn from 35 semi-structured, intensive, face-to-face interviews and six e-mail interviews with members from Permanent Representations of 15 member states, with members of the General Secretariat of the Council who regularly take part in Coreper or in Council working group sessions, and with officials from national ministries responsible for coordinating the instructions sent to the Permanent Representations.3 2 See Thelen 2004: 295; Christiansen 2001: 25; Wallace 2002: 328; Lewis 1998: 7; Beyers 1998: 3; Hayes-Renshaw/ Lequesne/ Mayor-Lopez 1989; Pag 1987. The same view has already been expressed by Walter Hallstein, who saw ’a great deal of psychological integration’ in Coreper (1969: 66). See for integrative effects of the committees on the Union as a whole the concepts developed by sociological institutionalists like Lewis 2000; 1998; for the concept of committee governance and its effects see Christiansen/ Kirchner 2000. 3 The interview transcripts are used anonymously, in the following text, interview transcripts are therefore simply given numbers. The sample of interviewees has been selected on the basis of the principles of ‘theoretic sampling’. For the analysis of the collected interview data, MaxQDA has been used. The interviewees came from six new and from nine old EU member states. Lempp: “Coreper enlarged” 35 2. Preparing for Enlargement Before the ten candidate countries officially joined the EU in May 2004 they underwent intensive preparation. The core element of the one-year process was their ‘active observer status’ in all European institutions. In this way representatives of candidate states were actively involved in all negotiations within the Council, Coreper and the working groups. Moreover, although the observers did not have the right to vote they were able to influence negotiations by participating in discussions, delivering persuasive statements, and even alluding to future voting behaviour. In addition to providing for active observer status, the Council itself and the (future) member states prepared for enlargement in several other ways. The General Secretariat of the Council invited new member states to special trainings and preparatory seminars, and it provided them with practical literature (so-called ‘guidebooks’).
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