The Politics Behind Consensus: Tracing the Role of the Commission Within the European Employment Strategy

Abstract

By virtue of its favourable positioning within European Union (EU) decision-making processes, its vast array of constitutional resources, and its ability to articulate vision and direction, the European Commission stands at the heart of the EU system of governance (Nugent 2000). Accordingly, based on the central assumption – widely held in the field of European studies – that the Commission is a competence-maximizing rational actor, whose primary organizational goals are to expand the scope of Community competence and increase its own standing within the policy process (Majone 1991, Peters 1992, Cram 1993, Pollack 1994), scholarly debate has long been concerned with evaluating the extent to which the Commission independently impacts on EU decision-making. To date, commentators in this field have systematically sought to investigate and theorise the Commission’s role within the classic “Community method” (CCM), which has been its exclusive domain of action for the past four decades (Scott and Trubek 2002). However, this academic bias appears more and more untenable in view of the growing importance of new modes of governance – of which the Open Method of Coordination (OMC) is the most prominent example – within the political landscape of the EU. Accordingly, certain fundamental questions arise. How has the European Commission sought to adapt to these new modes of governance? What means has it employed to gain influence within such novel institutional frameworks?