The European Commission and the European Union Budget

Abstract

The European Union (EU) budget is at the heart of the European integration process. Behind its figures and numbers, it conceals political conflicts in which sectoral, national, and inter-institutional cleavages converge. Given its centrality, the EU budget has received surprisingly little attention in the literature. This research contributes to the scholarship on the EU budget by theorising and empirically tracing the evolution of the European Commission’s role in this policy domain. The research makes a case for the politicisation of the Commission’s political level in response to governmental and popular contestation. As the Commission’s political level became more political in its composition and functions, it progressively adopted a new set of budgetary preferences. The change became visible in the post-Maastricht and even more in the post-Lisbon era, when the Commission’s political level significantly shifted its preferences from budget maximisation to budget shaping and the creation of financial instruments outside the core EU budget. The Commission sought to prioritise its own political relevance above any other policy concern. Being increasingly politicised and presidential, the Commission also modified its positioning vis-à-vis the European Council, which emerged as the most suitable arena for projecting political power and asserting political relevance. The research proposes a novel theoretical framework and a systematic qualitative analysis of the evolution of the Commission’s.