Commission Leadership: Climate and Migration

Perhaps the most significant development of the last decade within the EU, has been the rise of the European Council. Due to the coming into force of the Lisbon Treaty, and three existential crises – Eurozone crisis, Refugee crisis, Brexit – the Heads of State and Government have come to play a prominent role in dealing with major challenges, like climate, energy, migration or the fate of the Euro. However, the effectiveness of Heads’ interventions in major reform processes has varied greatly, both within and between different issue-areas (e.g. banking union versus CEAS reform). A crucial factor has been the ability to link the proceedings at the level of the Heads to the work being done within the regular intra- and inter-institutional channels of Council, Commission and European Parliament. The institution that is primarily affected by this development is the European Commission. An increasingly intergovernmental union seemingly challenges the Commission’s formal and informal institutional prerogatives. During the refugee crises a political Commission repeatedly vied with the European Council and its president for control over the process, with often counterproductive results. Although still very provisional, it appears that on climate the new Commission is again set upon outdoing the European Council, echoing sentiments stemming from the EP. On migration, the new Commission’s ambitions are still rather ambiguous, by pledging to continue with the CEAS (Dublin) reform but also to focus on a strengthening of the external borders. This paper studies the role and influence of the European Commission in the broader system of European Council centered governance. We argue that the opportunities for the Commission to provide leadership are highly dependent: firstly on the timing and type of European Council involvement, and secondly on the type of institutional expertise that is required in the process. We provide a comparative analysis of the dynamics in two major issues areas: migration and climate. We analyse how these dossiers were/are handled in ‘the machine room’: by the EU institutions. We employ a new method of ‘embedded process tracing’ to reconstruct these machine room processes together with key participants, based on their own internal documentations and detailed recollections.