La Commission européenne entre autonomie et dépendance

Abstract

The European commission between autonomy and dependence Whereas the European Commission was designed at the most original institution of the European Union's political system, it is paradoxically one of the least studied by political scientists : little work has been devoted to the internal functioning of the Commission, because many political scientists have chosen to work mainly on the inter-state dimension of the European integration process. It is also because the Commission is an organisation that generally defies the models constructed by political scientists in order to analyse the relations between politics and the administration in national political systems. The article begins by reviewing various social science works devoted to the Commission since its creation. Considering the Commission as a complex organisation, it then analyses the resources that enable its various elements to act as policy entrepreneurs endowed with a margin of autonomy vis-à-vis governments and interest groups in the political system of the European Union. It seeks finally to demonstrate that this policy entrepreneurship is subject to endogenous and exogenous constraints. The conclusion is that studying the Commission's internal functioning, as that of all Community institutions, is indispensable in order to apprehend the characteristics of a European political system which is a balancing act between a logic of autonomisation and one of dépendance on the national actors.