European Union finances in the Commission’s hands: quality over quantity?

The European Union (EU) budget is relatively small compared to an average national budget. Yet, it has a considerable impact on public expenditure in EU member states. Since the budgetary reform in 1988, EU long-term budgets determine the levels and purposes of European finances for at least five years. This multi-annual budgetary procedure is initiated by the European Commission, which has the right to submit a budgetary proposal to the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union. The latter, as the two budgetary authorities, negotiate the proposal with an informal but increasingly relevant presence of the European Council. Studies of EU politics have well-depicted the power struggles among these actors. What is still missing in the literature, though, is a clear conceptualisation and detailed empirical account of the Commission’s role in this policy domain. Given the relevance of European finances in determining the future of EU integration, understanding how this institution performs its role in budgetary politics becomes crucial. There seems to be an expectation among EU scholars for the Commission to behave as a classic Weberian bureaucracy who primarily strives for budget maximisation. This paper challenges such an interpretation, arguing that the Commission’s role in the budgetary domain is more nuanced. There is a need, therefore, to trace the evolution of the preferences and strategies of the Commission towards European finances. The aim of this contribution is to fill in this gap by sketching out a new process-tracing model to study the evolution of the Commission’s role in EU budget politics. This novel approach, based on a new intergovernmentalist perspective of European integration, argues that the Commission preferences and strategies changed over time. Rather than an increase of the size of the European finances, the Commission seems progressively interested in exploiting the budget as a means to pursue its political priorities. Under the pressures of a more politicised environment, the Commission thus adjusts its preferences and strategies, acting as a pragmatic entrepreneur and repositioning itself in the institutional system of the EU. This new framework intends to shed light on the progressive emergence of a closer link between European finances and the political agenda of the Commission, with considerable implications for the integration process. Besides the theoretical contribution, the paper also provides first empirical evidence on how the preferences and strategies of the Commission have evolved across the six long-term budgets of the EU. These insights might prove valuable in understanding better the adoption of new financial instruments in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. Not only a sudden crisis, but an underlying process of adaptation and repositioning explains how the Commission played its role in EU budget politics.