Council’s Responsiveness in Relation to the European Commission – The Case of Change in the EU Enlargement Policy

The relationship between the Council and the Commission is one of the most important field of analysis of the EU political system as well as the Union’s policy making. There is an interesting question of how the Council responds to modifications of particular EU policies involving the change of power relationship in these areas between the Council and the Commission. This paper is the analysis of the case of the EU enlargement policy. Since the beginning of the process of the enlargement the Commission has gradually been gaining new formal and informal competences. This situation was sometimes accepted by the member states and the Council, e.g. right after the introduction of the pre-accession strategy for candidates. However, more frequently the Council reacted in a different way and took actions to strengthen its position in this policy area at the expense of the Commission. This phenomenon intensified after 2004 and resulted in, for example, the provisions of the Lisbon Treaty or negotiating frameworks giving the member states more competences in the institutional framework of the EU enlargement policy. The aim of this paper is to analyse the reasons for the Council’s responses. The author will use the principal-agent theoretical approach, developed also in the context of the institutional change within the rational choice institutionalism. The basic assumption in this case, which says that ‘if the divergence between the principal’s and the agent’s preferences has become too large, the principal will redesign the contract, i.e. change the institutional rule in order to rein in the agent,’ will be crucial for the explanation.