A Politicized "Agent"? How Politicization Influences the European Commission's External Relations with Turkey in the Context of Migration Crisis

In recent years, supranational governance, marked by the continuous transfer of authority from nation-states to international institutions like the European Commission (EC), has seen an increase in its authority. Consequently, this shift has prompted the politicization of these institutions, moving away from a technocratic approach to decision-making that was once conducted behind closed doors. The EC is also not exempt from this process and has become a subject of politicization through increased salience and contestation over its policies and legitimacy. However, while there is recognition of the Commission's responsiveness to the politicization process in the literature, the current studies fall short of elucidating how this responsiveness and politicization is reflected within the sphere of external relations, where the EC's formal power is limited. It is crucial to understand this because the EC has amplified its role and responsibilities in external relations, owing to the increasingly blurred lines between internal and external affairs due to globalization and growing global interdependence. To fill the gap, this study integrates a framework that focuses on the EC’s influence in external relations, a largely overlooked aspect, with the existing literature on the politicization of international and executive institutions. Drawing from the debates on intergovernmentalism versus neofunctionalism, it questions whether the EC aims merely to be an effective agent, thereby affirming its necessity to member states, or if, due to ongoing politicization, it formulates its own political positions, problem definitions, and solutions that might diverge from the member states in the realm of external relations. Even more crucially, the study concentrates on potential internal political contestation within the Commission to understand whether there are contested patterns and responses to the ongoing politicization process among Commission officials. This study attempts to answer these questions by examining the policies and policy content crafted by the EC on Turkey, in the context of the migration crisis, adopting the process-tracing method. This approach is supplemented by interviews with officials from the Commission and the European External Action Service (EEAS) and an analysis of official documents. I argue that the EC's relations with Turkey during the migration crisis offer significant generalizability because they reflect the multidimensionality of the EU’s foreign policy and the intertwined nature of external and internal affairs, which coincides with the ongoing contestation and politicization of the EU. The results contribute to the literature by demonstrating that the EC’s external relations, where its formal power is limited, are also politicized through three informal mechanisms: (a) decisions on the prioritization of policies, tasks, and projects; (b) the instrumentalization of information asymmetries and issue linkage; and (c) the influence of increasingly politicized officials in inter-institutional meetings. This demonstrates how executive institutions, even those with limited formal power like the EC in its role in external relations, are not exempt from the politicization process, reflecting their responsiveness through informal mechanisms.